President Barack Obama proposed increasing the National Institutes of Health budget by $1 billion, or 3.2 percent, in fiscal 2011, earmarking $6 billion for cancer research and $222 million for work in autism.
The proposed $32.1 billion budget for the year beginning Oct. 1 falls short of the $36 billion the federal agency was able to spend in fiscal 2010 because of money from the government’s economic stimulus effort.
The cancer funding will help initiate 30 new drug trials in 2011 and a doubling of the number of novel compounds in clinical trials by 2016, according to budget documents. The autism push will help define genetic and environmental factors contributing to the disease.
“In this current economy, we have to applaud the president for recognizing the value of biomedical research,” Mark Lively, president of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, said today. “While it could have been much worse, we also have to recognize that it’s less than what NIH had to spend this year.”
The request for cancer research is an example. While the president said he would propose a “bold and innovative” cancer research program, his budget request is 1.5 percent less than is being spent in the current fiscal year 2010 that began this past October, including stimulus money, according to the NIH Web site. The plan is 10.6 percent less than the actual outlay in fiscal 2009.
$5 Billion More
Lively’s organization, located in Bethesda, Maryland, had asked the administration for an NIH budget of $37 billion, arguing the stimulus money “got spending back on track after flat-funding since 2003,” he said. The federation is made up of 23 professional groups, including the American Association of Immunologists, American Society of Human Genetics and American College of Sports Medicine.
“We know this sounds big, especially in this budget where I am sure there are departments seeing cuts,” he said. “But medical research isn’t like a highway project where you get the money, build the bridge and you’re done.”
The NIH provides almost one-third of the nation’s medical research grants, funding more than 300,000 scientists working in about 3,100 universities, medical schools, hospitals and research facilities. Although its budget doubled from fiscal 1998 and 2003, funding remained unchanged in the years since -- until 2009 when it was awarded $10.4 billion under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the formal name for the stimulus legislation.
Remaining Funding
The Bethesda-based agency still has about half of that money left to allocate in the remainder of fiscal 2010, according to Jenny Haliski, an NIH spokeswoman.
“We are aware of the broader economic climate we’re facing,” said David Pugach of the American Cancer Society’s Cancer Action Network in Washington. “We hope Congress will agree with the president and even add more to the cancer appropriation.”
Obama proposed today that money in the 2011 budget be used to work on the cancer genome atlas, a project started with $1.26 billion in stimulus funds allotted to cancer, said Pugach, associate director of federal relations. The project will map genomic characteristics of the 20 most-common malignancies, enabling doctors to customize treatment to patients.
“This is important because it will help ensure the work goes on and the significant investment in it will not be wasted,” he said.
Disappearance of Stimulus
Investors are concerned that biomedical research funding may fall in the 2012 fiscal year, when grant recipients will no longer have stimulus dollars, said Isaac Ro, a New York-based life sciences analyst with Leerink Swann & Co.
“NIH funding remains poised for a decline on an absolute dollar basis post-stimulus,” Ro said in a note published today. The agency’s increase in the president’s budget is still better than the three-year discretionary spending freeze that was feared last week, he said.
In a Jan. 27 note, Ro said Illumina Inc. in San Diego, Affymetrix Inc. in Santa Clara, California, and Life Technologies Corp. in Carlsbad, California, had “the highest exposure to academic and government labs and by extension NIH funding,” he said.
The NIH will focus investments on areas including genomics, global health and science to support a health-care overhaul, according to Obama’s proposal today.
Cancer Genome
The stimulus money, which the administration said was a one-time boost, went to fund projects in DNA sequencing and study of the cancer genome, according to the NIH Web site.
“NIH is the foundation of basic science research in health,” said Lively, who is also the director of molecular genetics program at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. There is nothing that can pick up the slack when it doesn’t get the money.”
NIH and medical research face two hurdles to growth this year -- Obama’s call for a spending freeze and the priority he has placed on non-health-related science research in alternative energy development.
“The feeling in Washington may be that you guys in health got your money,” said Patrick Clemins, of the Washington-based American Academy for the Advancement of Science. “Now, it’s someone else’s turn.”
Leadership
The U.S., if it pulls back on spending, may cede its leadership in research and development to countries such as China, which is increasing funding, said Mary Woolley, the president of Research!America, an advocacy group based in Alexandria, Virginia. The coalition has 500 member organizations including the medical schools of Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University and Yale University and companies led by New York-based Pfizer Inc. and Johnson & Johnson, of New Brunswick, New Jersey.
The U.S. is by far the leader in spending on research and development, accounting for 35 percent of the global total in 2008, 2009 and 2010, according to a study by Columbus-based Battelle Memorial Institute, a science and technology research and development enterprise. China in those years has increased its share from 9.1 percent to 12.2 percent, the report showed.
“Whenever there is a breakthrough in health care, the benefit is enjoyed worldwide,” she said. “But the economic benefit goes to the country where the breakthrough is made. Will those new startups be here or will they be in Singapore or India or China?
“Japan has been cutting its spending in those years and many see that as ceding the No. 2 position in the world to China,” Woolley said. “It could happen to the U.S. It happened before in autos and consumer electronics.”
SOURCE: bloomberg
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