On The Cusp Cancer, Hiv Success Gets $10.4 Billion Obama Push
The New York researcher suspects shes found a better way to test vaccines before they are given to humans. Proving her finding will work requires expanding her research team and facilities at a cost of about $160,000, money she says she doesnt have. Now, she says, she has new hope.
Hatziioannou is among more than 15,000 scientists already competing to dip into an unparalleled 30 percent jump in the budget for the National Institutes of Health, the top U.S. provider of grants to universities, hospitals and companies. The money is part of President Barack Obamas $787 billion plan to aid the economy through spending on jobs and equipment. In the NIHs case, it may also seed breakthrough findings on obesity, AIDS, Alzheimers, Parkinsons and cancer, scientists said.
“So many important discoveries are on the cusp of being made,” said Richard B. Marchase, president of the Bethesda, Maryland-based Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, whose group represents 22 scientific societies with a combined 90,000 members. “This is important for scientists” seeking to create the new drugs, vaccines and devices needed to battle disease, he said.
The University of Chicago alone has filed 180 applications for research funding, or five times their usual yearly submission, said Martha OConnell, a spokeswoman. The schools requests include money to study breast and lung tumors, and mesothelioma, a malignancy of internal membranes thats been tied to asbestos exposure.
New Avenue
Hatziioannou, 39, says shes requested that an existing grant be expanded to help her build on recent discoveries about monkey proteins. The protein discovery “is a whole new avenue we hadnt even thought of before,” Hatziioannou said in an interview. Her aim is to find a way to have the animals bodies more closely mimic the way the human body would respond when given experimental AIDS drugs.
“Its been very tough to get money over the last few years,” said Hatziioannou, who works at Manhattans private Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center. “The only problem I see with the stimulus funding is that its limited to two years.”
Stunningly Large
The increase is “a stunningly large number,” said Shirley M. Tilghman, a molecular biologist and president of Princeton University, in Princeton, New Jersey, in an interview. “It is unprecedented. There has never been anything like it.”
Researchers at Princeton, which doesnt have a medical school, have submitted 41 applications to work on genomics and molecular biology, said A. J. Stewart Smith, the universitys dean of research.
The 15,000 applicants so far have sought “Challenge Grants,” according to figures supplied by the agency. Those focus on “new approaches” to HIV, cancer and pain management, along with other categories identified by the agency.
The yearly budget for the 27 research agencies and centers that make up the NIH has stayed at about $29 billion since 2005. The budget for this fiscal year is $30.4 billion, not including the stimulus.
Congress, under President Bill Clinton, began boosting NIH spending in 1998, when it was $13.7 billion. Annual increases of 15 percent brought the level to more than $27 billion in 2003. Under President George W. Bush, the budget grew $900 million in 2004 and $600 million in 2005, then stagnated, the NIH said.
AIDS Center
Clintons budget for the agency also established an AIDS vaccine research center to find a cure for the disease within ten years.
The Obama stimulus money must be spent by the end of September 2010, according to the legislation approving it. Obama is expected to seek a further $6 billion for the NIH in his formal budget plan to be introduced tomorrow, according to an outline published by the administration in February.
Historically, about two-thirds of research dollars go toward jobs, said Shandy Hussman, a managing director at Huron Consulting Group, a higher education consulting practice in Chicago. Between 240,000 and 270,000 people work now as the direct result of funding from the National Institutes, the U.S. agency says.
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