A December 16, 2015 STAT News article reported that “The National Institutes of Health will get a $2 billion funding increase in the federal spending bill released early Wednesday,” including a $350 million increase for Alzheimer’s funding. According to the article, “The bill gives $200 million to the Obama administration’s Precision Medicine Initiative — an effort to find treatments that can be targeted to an individual’s genetic makeup — and a $350 million increase for research on Alzheimer’s disease, an amount that could boost efforts to find an effective treatment by 2025. It also includes an $85 million increase for the BRAIN Initiative, the project to map the human brain.” Also reported on by The Hill. 

 

A December 15, 2015 The Des Moines Register opinion piece by former lawmakers Tom Harkin and John Porter underscored the need to “reinvest in the promise of medical research.” According to the authors, “Restoring funding to NIH now will also help strengthen our economy down the road.  Alzheimer’s costs the U.S. $226 billion a year in care, and that number is set to grow to a staggering $1.1 trillion a year by 2050. But if we could find a treatment that delays the onset of Alzheimer’s by just five years, it would cut those projected costs by one-third…The two of us — with the help of many in both parties — proved that Democrats and Republicans could work together on this issue for the good of the nation.  We can — and must — take action once again.” Former Sen. Tom Harkin, a Democrat from Iowa, was chairman of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education.  Former Rep. John Edward Porter, a Republican from Illinois, was chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education. 

A December 15, 2015 Voice of America article reported on Rice University research into how “neural progenitors, which are cells that can regenerate in the brain, form active neural networks.” According to the article, “Like many other people around the world, Qutub has seen how a stroke or a disease such as Alzheimer's can disrupt brain function, and she hopes this research will one day provide better treatment. ‘We are understanding the mechanism of how these cells can grow back, and with it we can identify better drugs and better targets from the basic science work,’ she said.”

 

A December 15, 2015 The Chronicle of Higher Education article reported on the lack of diversity in federally funded medical research. According to the article, “Clinical trials financed by the federal government persistently lack racial diversity, and are now being squeezed out in importance by less-reliable corporate-sponsored alternatives, a pair of study teams reported on Tuesday…It compiled NIH data on pulmonary research to show that the proportion of NIH-funded publications that reported racial or ethnic minorities among its participants had grown only slightly over 20 years, from around 2 percent in 1993 to around 5 percent in 2013.”

 

A December 15, 2015 Reuters article (via FoxNews) reported that “Every year since 2006 in the U.S., the amount of new medical research in humans that’s funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has gone down, while the number of industry-funded trials has gone up, a new study shows.”