House Approves Bill to Reform NIH, Enhance Research Budget Increased; New Common Will Accelerate Breakthroughs In Autism, Cancer, AIDS and Dozens of Other Diseases WASHINGTON – Congress took a giant step Tuesday evening to improve the federal government’s ability to discover new medical treatments and cures as the House approved the National Institutes of Health Reform Act of 2006 (H.R. 6164). The reauthorization bill, the first of its kind in 13 years, was approved overwhelmingly on a 414-2 vote, marking a personal milestone for its chief sponsor, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Joe Barton, R-Texas, who spent years crafting the legislation. In recent years, Congress has doubled NIH’s budget to approximately $28 billion, but left the hodge-podge structure of the agency untouched. The result was more money fueling the inherent inefficiency in which research was sometimes duplicated by institutes which literally didn’t know that they were copying each other’s work. If enacted, the committee’s bipartisan bill would represent the agency’s first agenda-setting reauthorization since 1993. Improving the way the NIH does business has been a priority for Barton since he became chairman in 2004. Barton’s legislation has won the endorsement of 46 leading scientific societies, research institutions and patient-advocacy groups, including the Association of American Medical Colleges, the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, the Association of American Universities, the American Heart Association, the March of Dimes and the Parkinson’s Action Network. “This legislation will strengthen the research efforts of the NIH and will provide the foundation for future scientific and medical advancement,” Barton said shortly before the House vote. “For 13 years, this program has remained unauthorized despite a Republican-led effort to double the NIH budget. Meanwhile, the science has sped past. We can help the NIH catch up by providing it with not just twice the money, but the tools it needs to reorganize and revitalize. “We can accomplish all that and do the taxpayers a good turn, too, with increased transparency and improved strategic planning on how research funds are allocated at NIH,” Barton added. “Increased transparency of NIH research activities can only serve to improve research portfolio management, provide greater accountability of research dollars, and spur creative thinking about new scientific approaches.” Specifically, H.R. 6164 would: Authorize a five percent annual increase in NIH’s budget for fiscal years 2007-2009; Launch a new, agency-wide electronic reporting system to catalogue all of the research activities of the NIH in a standard format; Limit the overall size of the NIH to the current 27 institutes and centers; Set up a “common fund” to support particularly promising research that cuts across multiple institutes or centers. The common fund is capped at five percent of the overall NIH budget; and Create a Scientific Management Review Group, composed of institute and center directors and other experts, to evaluate NIH’s structural organization at least once every seven years and propose any restructuring plans it deems necessary. ####