A bipartisan Congressional deal reached Sunday night calls for an additional $400 million in funding for Alzheimer’s disease research as part of a $2 billion increase in this year’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget, StatNews reported.
The increase will bring federal funding of Alzheimer’s disease research to $1.4 billion, a threefold increase over the last five years, according to the Alzheimer’s Association.
The deal does not address 2018, when President Donald Trump has called for an 18-percent cut in the NIH budget. The NIH supports medical research across the nation, including at the Penn Memory Center (PMC).
PMC Co-Director Dr. Jason Karlawish called the proposed cuts “frightening” at the Research Partner Thank You Breakfast in March. The cuts would most directly impact junior researchers vying for new grants, he said.
“The signals we’re sending to that generation are: don’t go into academic medicine, don’t go into research, the funding is unstable,” he said.
Dr. Dave Wolk, PMC Co-Director said the collaborative efforts in the Alzheimer’s disease research field have been “a guiding light for cooperative science between institutions and nations.”
“We’ve worked very hard with less, and it would be a very hard transition to go back to that,” he said at the breakfast.
– by Terrence Casey