Congress and Obama Administration Raise NIH Budget

In the first major legislative action of the Obama Administration and new Congress, on February 17^th,2009, the President signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, commonly referred to as the Economic Stimulus package. Noteworthy in the package was approval of $10 billion in funding for the National Institutes of Health.

Raising the budget ofthe National Institutes of Health has been a major public policy initiative of BIOCOM, as NIH funding is the idea engine that fuels the development of new medical devices and technologies.

Please click here to read an opinion piece printed in the San Diego Union-Tribune from September of 2007 on the importance of NIH funding from Greg Lucier of Life Technologies (formerly Invitrogen) and BIOCOM's Joe Panetta titled "Give NIH what it needs for nation's health."

According to the NIH Office of Legislative Planning and Analysis (http://olpa.od.nih.gov/), funds in the bill for the NIH are specified as follows:

•The legislation includes $1.3 billion for the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR), of which $1 billion is for competitive awards for the construction and renovation of extramural research facilities and $300 million for the acquisition of shared instrumentation and other capital research equipment.
•The bill provides $8.2 billion for the NIH Office of the Director (OD), of which $7.4 billion is designated for transfer to Institutes and Centers and to the trans-NIH Common Fund. The remaining $800 million is to be retained in the OD to be used for purposes that can be completed within two years; priority is to placed on short-term grants that focus on specific scientific challenges, new research that expands the scope of ongoing projects, and research on public and international health priorities. Bill language is included to permit the Director, NIH, to use $400 million for flexible research authority. The funds available to NIH can be used to enhance central research support activities, such as equipment for the Clinical Research Center or intramural activities, centralized information support systems, and other related activities as determined by the Director.
•The Act provides $500 million for NIH Buildings and Facilities, for construction as well as renovation.
•$1.1 billion is provided to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality for comparative effectiveness research, of which $400 million is to be transferred to NIH. The comparative effectiveness research portion of the funding will be discussed in the next issue of the BCQ.

BIOCOM, BIO and a number of individual companies (including Arena Pharmaceuticals), advocated strongly but ultimately were unsuccessful in including a provision that would have helped companies not yet profitable by utilization of their Net Operating Loss or Research and Development credits. We will continue to seek opportunities to help these companies, many of whom are being adversely affected by the near freezing of the capital markets.

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