President Donald Trump last week signed a $1.1 trillion spending bill for fiscal year 2017, including a welcome $2 billion boost for the NIH that will support former Vice President Joe Biden's Cancer Moonshot initiative, among other priorities. However, researchers who rely heavily on NIH grant funding remain concerned about proposed cuts for 2018.

In May, President Donald Trump signed a $1.1 trillion spending bill for the remainder of fiscal year (FY) 2017, which includes a $2 billion increase for the NIH. The move comes as a relief to many in the biomedical research community, which is gearing up to fight massive cuts in FY 2018 in the wake of a White House budget proposal to reduce the agency's funding by nearly 20%.

The funding increase expands the NIH's total annual budget by 6.2% to $34.1 billion. The NCI will be allocated $5.69 billion of this amount—an overall boost of $476 million, of which $300 million was appropriated in December for the Beau Biden Cancer Moonshot as authorized by the 21st Century Cures Act.

“A reduction in the nation's investment in the NIH could have threatened ongoing progress toward better healthcare for our citizens and undermined the competitiveness of our biomedical research enterprise,” says William Nelson, MD, PhD, director of the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center in Baltimore, MD. “Hopefully, the increased funding for cancer research will enable progress toward former Vice President Biden's Moonshot initiative.”

The funding increase for the NIH also includes:

  • a $120 million increase, appropriated through the 21st Century Cures Act, for the Precision Medicine Initiative to compile a database of genetic and health data from 1 million people

  • a $110 million increase for the BRAIN initiative, to create a comprehensive map of the brain

  • a $400 million increase for Alzheimer's disease research

Despite the overall good news, it's important to remember that NIH funding has not kept pace with inflation over the past decade, notes Arthur Levine, MD, senior vice chancellor for health sciences and dean of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania. In addition, many are concerned about the Trump administration's proposal to decrease NIH funding by 18% in FY 2018.

“Note that even with the $2 billion addition, NIH funding is still far behind what it would have been had its appropriation kept pace with the annual inflationary cost of biomedical research,” Levine says. “If Congress approves a strong shift from domestic to defense appropriations in the future, it's hard to imagine that the NIH will be spared.” –Janet Colwell

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©2017 American Association for Cancer Research.
2017
American Association for Cancer Research.