Labs are facing closure because of NIH budget cuts 

In the past few months we have written a few times about the impact the federal budget cuts known as the sequestration are having on medical research. Those posts are here.

Today the Huffington Post did a good — and depressing — job of showing the impact of those cuts on research teams around the country and on the potentially life-saving work those team are trying to complete. The reporter interviewed more than two dozen researchers and academic administrators and they told a uniform story of despair caused by years of flat budgets for the National Institutes of Health followed by this year’s $1.7 billion cut from the sequestration.

The piece written by Sam Stein documents our country’s lost investment in researchers, research equipment and promising research projects that are increasingly being idled, frozen in place for now. It raises the specter of many of these teams not being resurrected and a resulting brain drain ending our nation’s dominance in medical research.

Stein quoted Steven Warren, the vice chancellor for research at the University of Kansas, who was talking at a recent meeting of academic officials in Washington:

“It is like a slowly growing cancer. It’s going to do a lot of destruction over time.”

Private groups are stepping up to help bridge promising projects over these current gaps in funding. The American Society of Hematology (ASH) today announced the second round of funding for projects that had been deemed worthy by NIH peer review panels, but had fallen below the cutoff in today’s funding climate. A press release from ASH was widely disseminated by online new portals including Reuters.

The problem is some 700 projects fall into that same worthy-but-unfunded limbo at NIH. ASH funded 12 today and hopes to fund up to 30. The gap is too large for private groups to close. States can potentially have a bigger role and a few have significant research funding streams, but none as robust as California’s through CIRM. You can read about our funding here.

The academic community has turned up its efforts to get the budget cuts reversed. Recently, 165 professors and college presidents wrote to President Obama and members of Congress asking them to take action now. Let’s hope they get a good response soon.

Don Gibbons