The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded some $5 billion in grants to support research seeking to develop cures for cancer and other diseases, and to create jobs.
President Barack Obama made the announcement Wednesday at the NIH campus in Bethesda, Md., with Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.
The money is part of the feds $787 billion economic stimulus program designed to help create jobs and stop the U.S. economy's downward spiral. It is part of an overall $100 billion, $10 billion for the NIHan investment in science and technology to lay the foundation for the innovation economy of the future.
More than $1 billion of the grant funding is dedicated to research applying the technology produced by the Human Genome Project between 1990 and 2003. This new funding will allow researchers to make quantum leaps forward in studying the genomic changes linked to cancer, heart, lung, and blood disease and autism- potentially leading to new treatments and cures. The investment includes $175 million for The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) to collect more than 20,000 tissue samples from more than 20 cancers, and determine in detail all of the genetic changes in thousands of these tumor samples. TCGA involves more than 150 scientists at dozens of institutions around the country. All data will be rapidly deposited in databases accessible to the worldwide research community.
The $5 billion will help fund more than 12,000 existing projects and create tens of thousands of jobs in research and education over the next two years, as well as medical equipment makers and suppliers.
"We are about to see a quantum leap in our understanding of cancer," says Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D., director, NIH. "Cancer is a disease of DNA--it occurs when glitches in the DNA cause a good cell to go bad. This ambitious effort promises to open new windows into the biology of all cancers, transform approaches to cancer research and raise the curtain on a more personalized era of cancer care. This is an excellent example of how the Recovery Act is fueling discoveries that will fundamentally change the way we fight disease and improve our lives."
Source: Francis S. Collins, NIH
Writer: Walaika Haskins