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Print Edition StoriesMonday, June 21, 2010
Mass. biotechs, hospitals boosted by health stimulus funds
By Julie M. Donnelly
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When Ron Rieder heard this week that his five-person biotech company would get just under $2 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health, as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, he was elated and relieved.
“We were stuck. I hate to use this term, but we were really in the valley of death,” said Rieder, the founder of Woburn-based BioSense Technologies. “The viability of the company was in question.”
Federal NIH stimulus money has washed into Massachusetts hospitals, medical schools and biotech companies, lifting an already impressive level of NIH funding by more than 20 percent. The state’s total NIH windfall in 2009 — boosted by the stimulus — was $2.83 billion in 2009, up from $2.34 billion in 2008. From the time ARRA was enacted in February 2009, Massachusetts has received $622.8 million in health-related stimulus to support 1,502 projects, second only to California in both dollar totals and number of grants.
Many of the grants are given to projects that could potentially have a wide impact on public health. For instance, BioSense is developing a technology that will help detect bacteria in blood platelets, reducing the incidence of bacterial infections and sepsis in patients who have blood transfusions. The screening technique is faster than current methods, and can be done just before a patient receives the blood. The widespread use of this method, Rieder said, could expand the shelf life of platelets, which is currently only five days, as mandated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
The NIH said that the technology could help alleviate blood platelet shortages and improve faith in the blood supply through better detection of bacteria. Rieder said that there is now renewed interest in the company from a few potential commercial partners, who had previously judged BioSense to be a risky investment.
Some of the grants are designed to fuel cutting-edge, early-stage academic research. Carla Bender Kim, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and a member of Children’s Hospital’s stem cell program, is working on research to determine if lung cancer tumors have stem cells.
“We’ve determined that some cells are important, and are able to reproduce the tumor when transplanted into another animal. But other cells aren’t as important to the tumor’s growth,” Kim said. Kim and her lab want to determine if there are lung cancer stem cells, and if so, is there a genetic mutation, or biomarker, that might make it easier to identify which tumors have these stem cells. This information could eventually help develop drugs targeting those stem cells. The multiyear grant, worth $780,000, has helped to accelerate Kim’s research.
A large number of the ARRA NIH awards went to Massachusetts hospitals. In addition to Children’s Hospital, other big winners included Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
“What’s really great for us, is that for every dollar, the NIH also contributes an additional 73 cents for infrastructure and overhead,” said Randy Mason, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center’s vice president for research. Beth Israel has received a total of $47.3 million to support 110 projects. Mason said that many foundation grants average only 10 percent in additional overhead dollars, so a larger proportion of government grants is a much better “payer mix” for the hospital’s bottom line. Mason said one project that might not have been funded, without the ARRA money, is an innovative “co-clinical trial” study that pairs an animal and human study, running concurrently, designed to speed up drug development.
“The Obama administration has been talking about comparative effectiveness, and here’s a project that does that,” said Barrett Rollins, Dana-Farber’s chief scientific officer.
Rollins said one ARRA-funded project will create a database of cancer patients’ clinical outcomes, to help determine which treatments work best and avoid waste in the health care system for ineffective treatments. The database would eventually be made public. In total, Dana-Farber received $54 million in funding, including projects where the institute is a subcontractor, covering 104 projects.
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