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Friday, February 27, 2009
Biomed Notebook
Pork is in the eye of the biotech beholder
By Marc Songini
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With the contentious but successful passage of President Barack Obama’s stimulus bill, the region’s life sciences, health care and medical device companies, researchers and nonprofits are smacking their lips for the anticipated government bacon.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. So what if critics accused this legislation of being a piece of especially well-larded pork? As the late speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Thomas “Tip” O’Neill of Cambridge once said: “A good definition of a pork project is one that’s not in your area.” Local biotech advocates seem to be agreeing in spirit with that sentiment. They see the stimulus bill as a way to help local companies survive the downturn, launch new startups, fund new cures, and help Massachusetts implement its proposed electronic health records initiative.
This American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 will provide 79,000 jobs in Massachusetts alone, estimated Obama’s administration. More specifically, the act calls for a major — and according to advocates, much-needed — boost to the National Institutes of Health budget, from $29 billion to $39 billion. Last month, the co-chairs of the Massachusetts Life Sciences Collaborative (part of the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative), an organization that promotes and guides the biotech industry, urged the Bay State’s federal legislators to boost the funding for the NIH as part of any upcoming economic stimulus package. The signers included Harvard University president Drew Faust and University of Massachusetts president Jack Wilson.
In it, they pointed out that funding for the NIH had been flat five years — and when you take inflation into account, it was down by 13 percent. Accordingly, the NIH is now funding fewer than two of every 10 grant applications. The results were grim: a “slowdown in scientific progress, a reduction in the new business spinouts derived from biomedical research and a delay in the delivery of new therapies to patients.” It was also discouraging new blood into the field: The average age of a NIH grant recipient is 43 and rising, they stated.
Now there’s another $10 billion. “It’s a good start,” said MIT’s legendary inventor, Robert Langer. “It will be good to see young scientists get funding.”
He’s not alone. Massachusetts Biotechnology Council president Robert Coughlin said in an e-mail that the funding increase in the stimulus package “reiterates that the Obama administration and members of Congress are committed to early-stage research and finding the cures and therapies we need.”
It doesn’t hurt that Massachusetts hosts the top five NIH-funded hospitals: Mass. General Hospital, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Children’s Hospital Boston.
Then there’s another $19 billion to assist states to convert to e-health records, but this is drawing a mixed review from at least one local advocate. “I’m upbeat that there’s real money being put toward this,” said Micky Tripathi, president and CEO of the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative, a nonprofit overseeing electronic medical record pilot programs. “I’m not upbeat that most of the money — $17 billion of the $19 billion — is in the form of direct payments to physicians, starting in 2011.”
Tripathi claimed that is “way too long a delay” and is only a windfall for those who’ve already implemented an e-health record system. Moreover, by paying the physicians directly, “there’s no infrastructure or accountability to protect the taxpayers’ investment and make sure that these systems get implemented efficiently, effectively and with the public benefit in mind.”
He noted there are the remaining funds from the stimulus bill, with various avenues for money to flow to Massachusetts by way of grants or loan mechanisms. However, the Secretary of Health & Human Services has a lot of discretion over it, so it’s hard to know right now just how it will affect the state.
Hopefully, whatever effect Obama’s package is going to have will be felt soon.
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