PhRMA Annual Meeting Opens With Spotlight On NIH Funding
This article was originally published in The Pink Sheet Daily
Executive Summary
A scientist and a senator make the case for government investment in basic research.
The annual meeting of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufactures of America returned to Washington, D.C., this year, and the opening session on April 9 focused, as one might expect, on lobbying. But instead of just beating the drum for financial or regulatory relief, speakers concentrated much of their rhetoric on a target that would only indirectly benefit member companies – increased funding for the National Institutes of Health.
Craig Mello, the University of Massachusetts Medical School professor who shared the Nobel Prize in 2006 for the discovery of RNAi, talked about his daughter, who has type-1 diabetes. “There are a lot of diseases, it breaks my heart, that are much worse than what she’s got,” he said.
“The sad thing is with the genome sequence, increasingly we know what is wrong with these patients. In some cases, it’s even pretty clear how we could fix it. But we are not able to even begin to address those opportunities because we have flat-funded biomedical research for 12 years,” Mello said.
“At some point, people are going to say, why didn’t you tell this was happening? … We completed the human genome in 2001; there’s been no increase in funding. Of course with the sequester there’s been a cut. Yet in that time we’ve identified the generic basis for thousands of human diseases. In many cases, genetic understanding of the disease leads almost directly to a possible therapy,” he argued.
“We need to all of us speak with one voice to Congress, to our neighbors, that we are missing an opportunity to help ourselves.”
Sen. Booker Suggests Being “Whiny”
The last speaker of the day was Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., who has been serving for five months after winning a special election last fall and who by his own account still has that “new senator smell.”
Booker delivered a rousing stump speech that also managed to include a heavy dose of pharma policy observations, energizing attendees with a call for strengthening the R&D tax credit.
“We need to make it predictable, because we know that business, in order to invest, does not think in terms of congressional elections,” Booker said.
“In this year’s appropriations process … I’m asking Congress for a full funding for the National Institutes of Health. It is a crime in my opinion to underfund NIH in an age that we know that winning the competion for the best ideas, the most staggering innovations, also means an effort to create and stimulate that innovation.”
Booker advised the crowd to be “loud and whiny when it comes to things that are important.”
The case for funding NIH “is so clear and obvious,” he said. “Investments in NIH produce multiple returns on that investment in creating a stronger economy, creating jobs, and creating advancements that will alleviate the suffering of others. … The returns are so obvious and so staggering that everyone losses if we fail to make them.”
Fighting The Budget Case
So far, however, the obviousness seems mostly lost on administration budget setters and congressional appropriators. Increased funding anywhere in government seems a tough sell in the current financial and political climate.
President Obama’s budget calls for a relatively slender $211 million increase in NIH funding, and a House hearing on the request became a forum for critiquing the administration’s priorities more than pledging to build on the amount, as advocates had hoped (Also see "NIH Director Ignores Proposed Funding Based On HHS Goals In Budget Request" - Pink Sheet, 31 Mar, 2014.).
One proposal that could help make increased NIH funding an easier sell is a bill that would allow the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to do a 50-year analysis of the impact of federal health spending.
Reps. Reid Ribble, R-WI, and Mark Pocan, D-WI, are the lead sponsors of the “Long-Term Studies of Comprehensive Outcomes and Returns for the Economy Act" (or “Long-Term SCORE” Act).
“A 10-year budget window is simply not capable of capturing the total benefit of federal health research and prevention programs,” said Ribble in a statement. “We must ensure that those charged with estimating the impact of future health care legislation have the requisite tools to do so. Our legislation provides the necessary tools to accomplish this.”