FASEB President Robert Palazzo released a statement last week, making the connection between mortality rates and NIH funding. Responding to data the National Center for Health statistics released that showed that U.S. life expectancy has exceeded 78 years for the first time ever, Dr. Palazzo said, “Americans are living longer, healthier lives, and we owe much of that success to biomedical research.” The FASEB President pointed to significant declines in heart disease, cancer, and diabetes as examples of diseases for which fundamental research the National Institutes of Health supported played a critical role in developing treatments. Dr. Palazzo stated that “thanks to NIH research, millions of deaths from heart disease have been averted, millions more people have survived cancer, and deaths from diabetes have decreased dramatically.” Palazzo also warned of the negative consequences for failing to adequately sustain the NIH budget: “In order to ensure the breakthrough discoveries that will be key for treating Alzheimer’s, spinal cord injury, Parkinson’s disease, and other serious illnesses, it is imperative that NIH remains a national funding priority.” To read the full statement, please visit: http://opa.faseb.org/pdf/2008/Mortality.decline.6.1.08.pdf

During the same week that Representatives Brian Bilbray (R-CA) and Susan Davis (D-CA) sponsored a California delegation “Dear Colleague” letter to House leaders requesting a “robust investment in the National Institutes of Health (NIH)” during the upcoming appropriations cycle for fiscal year 2009, on June 11, the California Healthcare Institute (CHI) sponsored a briefing in the House on NIH: Fueling Healthcare Innovation in California. Speakers included Representative Bilbray, David Gollaher, Ph.D., the President of CHI, and Daniel Andrade, the Salk Institute’s Director of Academic and International Services. At the briefing, CHI unveiled its new report addressing the importance of NIH research to advances in healthcare innovation and public health. The report illustrates why NIH funding is critical to continuing California’s global leadership in biomedical innovations by featuring perspectives of California biomedical industry leaders and highlighting technology transfer success stories as well as innovations from academic research that have achieved commercial success and improved human health.

After Representative Bilbray’s welcoming remarks, Dr. Gollaher presented slides that identified California as the largest state recipient of NIH funding, given that it received $1.61 billion in 2007. Dr. Gollaher also noted that the University of California is the largest academic system recipient of NIH funding in the country. He did add, however, that on a per capita basis, California actually ranks second among the states for NIH funding, behind Massachusetts and in a tie with New York. Generally, Dr. Gollaher opined that the decrease in NIH funding is having an adverse impact on innovation in California, inasmuch as it’s creating lower success rates for initial submissions of grants and increasing the amount of time scientists have to spend applying for grants rather than researching.

The Salk Institutes’s Danny Andrade specifically addressed the adverse impact the decline in NIH funding is having in the nonprofit arena. Given that traditionally, 65-70% of the Salk Institute’s budget derives from NIH, Mr. Andrade said the Institute has lost the ability to pursue certain avenues of research with a decline in grants. Accordingly, the Institute has had to initiate an “innovation grants” program, which is a competitive grant award system its own Board is funding, in an effort to compensate for the lack of money from NIH.

The speakers also discussed the braindrain in the U.S., attributing it to researchers’ moving to Canada and Singapore and to a decline in students who choose to pursue science due to the lack of financial incentive. Finally, in response to a question from a biomedical funding advocate who wondered how to respond to doubts on the part of Congress that the NIH doubling was successful and how, therefore, to reconcile asking for more funding for NIH, Dr. Gollaher cited NIH Director Elias Zerhouni, Ph.D.’s response to similar questions in congressional hearings. Dr. Zerhouni has refuted the premise that doubling NIH’s budget was a failure by reminding Congress that it takes a long time to obtain a return on an investment in basic research. He then asks Members to consider the improvements in human health and the increases in treatments and cures for disease over the past few decades as evidence of NIH’s historical success, suggesting further that the health outcome of the recent doubling of NIH’s budget will become evident in decades to come.