Although the 2015 agreement reached massive spending by Congress last night gives the National Institutes of Health (NIH) a flat budget, it contains modest increases for some programs within the agency. A companion report also contains a number of directives that the defenders of biomedical research are eyeing with suspicion.
The increase of $ 150 million, only 0.5% boost to $ 29.9 billion it received last year, still leaves NIH below its level of the budget in 2012, before the sequestration took a mouthful of 5%, noted defenders of biomedical research. It is far from an increase of $ 606 million a subcommittee of the Senate had approved expenditure and lower than the request of the White House for $ 211 million. "We appreciate any increase, but it is not doing the job. We are going backwards, "says Jennifer Zeitzer, deputy director of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology Public Affairs office in Bethesda, Maryland.
The bill singles out some areas for larger increases. The National Institute on Aging gets an increase of $ 28.6 million, or an increase of 2.4% to $ 1.2 billion. "[A] substantial portion" of the new money should go to Alzheimer's disease based on the quality of grant proposals, said a report accompanying the bill. Some institutes also received a boost through an increase of $ 25 million for the BRAIN initiative of the Obama administration, which receives a total of $ 65 million.
The $ 12.6 million project also tags law for a new pediatric research initiative that Congress created earlier this year by passing the law on research Gabriella Miller Kids first. The program is supposed to be funded by a check-off box on tax returns that finance political conventions. But apparently, the Congress decided to get started by including the money in the budget of the NIH, said David Moore, director of government relations at the Association of American Medical Colleges in Washington, DC
in addition, the bill provides $ 238 million NIH to research and Ebola vaccine development as part of a $ 5.2 billion emergency bill across government for Ebola.
a recent concern about the NIH budget every year money is skimmed off for other Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) agencies-is addressed in the bill. He said the $ 700 million that the NIH is set to contribute to "exploit" this year will come back as $ 715 million for the agency. (After this accounting maneuver, NIH always receives only a total of $ 150 million more than last year, however.) Other HHS agencies that have already received part of their budgets to this faucet will instead get direct credits Moore notes.
The report also directs NIH to pay more attention to the age at which new NIH researchers receive their first research grant, now 42 on average. NIH "is directed to develop a new approach to taking action to reduce" this age. The language echoes a controversial proposal by the Representative Andy Harris (R-MD), a member of the Appropriations Committee of the House of Representatives that would require NIH to lower the age of the first R01 4 years within a decade, but not this specific objective.
lawmakers also are a constant concern: the amount of NIH dedicated to specific diseases ignores the burden that the disease creates or mortality rates. The report "urges NIH to ensure that research funds are invested in areas where American lives can be improved." It also indicates NIH "to prioritize federal funding for medical research on awareness and education," apparently a reference to a subsidy for a nutrition video game that Harris criticized as less important than the search for disease .
biomedical attorneys generally feel NIH should establish research priorities based on the quality of research proposals, not the burden of the disease or other criteria set by Congress. well that they worry about the aging of new researchers, they have reservations about Harris solutions. "what we see here is the committee expressing some concerns and set expectations," says Moore. "It is not certain that the next steps will be, but it is something that we will watch very closely"
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Complementary Medicine Institute NIH will receive a new name. Now called the National complementary and alternative medicine Centre, the bill replaces the last two words with "Integrative Health." the report says this is because interventions such as food supplements and therapy of spinal manipulation are now so widely used, they are not alternatives but are part of medical care.
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the report advises NIH to follow a report medicine Institute this past June recommend changes to the design and management of the national study of Special Education (NCS), a plan to track the health of 100,000 babies to adulthood. But the bill also says that 165 million $ allocated this year for the study could be spent on "research related to the goals and mission of the study" the NIH institutes.
The fate of the NCS will likely be decided later this week at a meeting of the Advisory Committee of the NIH director, in which a working group will recommend whether to launch the full study.
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* Update, December 11, 10:42 :. increased $ 25 million in the Initiative BRAIN was added to this article.
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