The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has gained a funding boost under a new congressional spending bill.
It was awarded $2 billion over the next five months that essentially honors the agreements laid out in the 21st Century Cures Act. This legislation, passed in the closing months of the Obama Administration, opens new avenues for increasing investments in cancer research, combats drug abuse, and seeks new ways to expedite medical device and drug approvals.
Here’s how the numbers break down, according to STAT News.
An estimated $800 million will be allocated to different opioid addiction programs based at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Health Resources and Services Administration, as well as the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
Lawmakers designated specific increases for disease research areas like Alzheimer’s, which will receive an extra $400 million. An additional $476 million was given to the National Cancer Institute whereas former President Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative and BRAIN Initiative gained respective increases of $120 million and $110 million.
Both parties coming together on this agreement sent a signal that they rejected President Trump’s previous budget proposal calling for steep cuts in government-funded science research to offset big increases in military and defense spending.
A number of disease research groups voiced their criticism of the President’s plan saying, “the suggested budget cuts to the NIH will impact researchers and their jobs in universities across the country, diminish U.S. scientific global leadership and drag down U.S. scientific advancement.”
Members of the previous administration like former Vice President Joe Biden expressed their concern over the proposal. Biden called the suggested cuts ‘draconian’ and said this would set the NIH and the field of biomedical research back 15 years.
The spending bill doesn’t address the next fiscal year, but a study done by the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology found that factors like budget cuts and sequestration made the NIH lose 22 percent of its capacity to fund research between 2003 and 2015.
This resulted in fewer grants, fewer new discoveries, and talented scientists leaving their research behind.
However, a new report in Nature says the agency is going to implement a new point system as part of an effort to streamline the process for scientists obtaining grants. The metric called the Grant Support Index will assign a point value to each type of grant according to its complexity and size.
Essentially, the NIH will distribute these points in the hopes of helping researcher spend more time in the lab and less on paperwork and other administrative issues.
“Because scientific discovery is inherently unpredictable, there are reasons to believe that supporting more researchers working on a diversity of biomedical problems, rather than concentrating resources in a smaller number of labs, might maximize the number of important discoveries that can emerge from the science we support,” wrote Francis Collins, the NIH director, in a blog post.
