WASHINGTON, D.C. — Today, Senator Jim Banks (R-Ind.) discussed the importance of fair health research funding for Indiana universities with National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Dr. Bhattacharya during a Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee hearing titled “Modernizing the National Institutes of Health: Faster Discoveries, More Cures.”
See remarks below:
Senator Banks said, “Indiana is home to three R1 research institutions, Indiana University, Purdue, and Notre Dame. Just to give a few examples, IU is making groundbreaking discoveries into early onset Alzheimer’s research treatments. Purdue is focused on treatments for opioid addiction and pioneering the science of suppressing cancer-related genes is just one example. Notre Dame is exploring how to make malaria less resistant to antibiotics. Those are just a few examples of the type of important research is going on in my great state to make Americans healthier…Despite having the country’s largest medical school at Indiana University and several top-notch research institutions, Indiana only got about $350 million of NIH funding last year… To contrast that, the state of Massachusetts, which is virtually the same size as my state, received nearly $3 billion last year in NIH funding. What’s going on here? Can you explain why schools on the coasts seem to get more NIH funding than schools and or states like my state that’s doing a lot of research as well?”
Dr. Battacharya said, “I’ve been around the country… I’m hoping to visit Indiana and I’ve been Kansas, a whole bunch of places. There are great ideas everywhere, Senator. What happens is the NIH, the way that we fund the facilities is tied to having great researchers already there that can win NIH money. But there’s a catch -22 here, right? In order to attract great researchers, you have to have great facilities. You see the problem, right? It’s a catch-22… I would love to work with Congress to find a way to break that link so that maybe introduce a market for facility support. So if Purdue can have a square for the lab space more inexpensively than some other institution, that they would get a leg up in getting that money, introduce sort of market thinking into distributing the facility support and unlink it from the grants of the projects… linking the projects to the facility support, I think, is what leads to that concentration that you’re talking about.”
