This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.
NIH awards $5 billion in Recovery Act grants
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
President Barack Obama announced yesterday that the NIH has awarded more than 12,000 Recovery Act grants, totaling $5 billion in funding.
This amount represents approximately half of the $10.4 billion allocated to the NIH in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act aimed at furthering research to treat and prevent HIV, cancer and heart disease.
“In today’s speech, the president emphatically reiterated his commitment to supporting science and technology for biomedical research in general and for cancer in particular,” Tyler Jacks, PhD, president of the American Association for Cancer Research, and director of the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in a press release.
Cancer Genome Atlas project
President Obama also announced the expansion of the Cancer Genome Atlas project, which will characterize DNA from nearly 20,000 cancer specimens involving 20 cancer types, according to a press release.
“This information will only have value if we can fund the research that explains how the alterations in cancer genomes can allow us to treat the cancer more effectively or prevent it from occurring at all,” Jacks said.
Funded projects will expand the Cancer Genome Atlas project and explore environmental factors that cause cancer, according to Obama.
“This represents the single largest boost to biomedical research in history,” Obama said. “We’re applying what scientists have learned through the Human Genome Project to understand disease. In cancer, we’re beginning to see treatments based on genetic changes that cause the disease.”
Commitment to spending
Rebecca Riggins, PhD, research assistant professor of oncology at Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, in Washington, D.C., recently received one of the awards and was on hand to discuss the announcement during the press conference. She received a cancer prevention research small grant program award funded through the stimulus package.
“The grant is focused on understanding how certain genetic and environmental factors affect susceptibility to breast cancer risk,” Riggins said during a teleconference. “The impact of the stimulus package award on my particular research has been really tremendous.”
As important as the stimulus funding is, however, without sustained funding, the full potential of this investment will not be realized, according to Jacks.
“One of the great difficulties we have experienced over the last eight years has been a flattening and in real terms a reduction in spending which has led to good ideas staying on the shelf and to other programs being downsized and eliminated. So, in order to be truly effective we need to be ramping up and staying at a high level [of spending] for a significant amount of time,” Jacks said during a teleconference.
David Bernstein, PhD, senior policy analyst at the AACR, emphasized the importance of the stimulus package for both cancer research and the economy.
“It is encouraging that the president and congressional leadership saw fit to stimulate both our scientific enterprise and the national economy over the short and long term,” he said during the teleconference. “We know that every dollar stimulates a second dollar of economic stimulus in the local area, and we know that over the long term the investment will be magnified.”
“The stimulus funding is indeed a windfall for the research community and it is very much appreciated, but we look to the administration to deliver on its promise to provide increased investment in biomedical research over the long term,” Jacks said in a press release. “Only in this way can we ensure that the United States remains the world's leader in scientific breakthroughs and discovery.”
