Several months behind the rest of its 2012 budget proposal, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has produced the much-awaited minutiae of how it intends to fund a new center for translational medicine beginning in October.
The detailed budget chart for the proposed National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) is part of this letter sent to Senator Tom Harkin (Democrat, Iowa) on June 6 by Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of Health and Human Human Services, NIH’s parent agency. Harkin chairs the subcommittee that funds the NIH, and his approval of NIH’s reorganization plan will be crucial to the agency’s ability to launch the NCATS. Director Francis Collins has pushed hard to have that happen at the beginning of the government’s 2012 fiscal year, on October 1st.
“Chairman Harkin is a supporter of the NCATS concept in principle, but will be examining this specific proposal,” Harkin’s communications director, Kate Cyrul, said in an email on June 7.
As the subcommittee writes its spending bill for 2012, others will be looking at it closely too: Sen. Richard Shelby (Alabama), the senior Republican on the subcommittee, pressed Collins last month on why he had not yet delivered the detailed plan to the subcommittee. He also questioned “whether NCATS is the right approach” to speeding experimental drugs to patient bedsides.
(Sebelius wrote confidently to Harkin that NCATS will do just this, “accelerating the development and delivery of new and more effective diagnostics and therapeutics.” She also reminded him that the proposal is not asking for new money beyond that already sought by the Obama’s administration’s 2012 budget request.)
The chart now in Harkin’s hands describes a $722 million new center at the $30.8 billion biomedical agency, and documents the attendant dissolution of the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR). Over $553 million in programs from the $1.3 billion NCRR will be transferred to the new translational medicine center, providing more than three of every four dollars in the new center’s budget. (The rest of NCRR’s programs will be parceled out to several institutes, and to the office of the NIH director.)
The detailed budget conforms closely to the plan that Collins first described this winter, with several existing NIH programs being moved to create the new center, and one brand new bolus of funds contributing as well. The key pieces of the proposal are as follows:
NCRR’s Clinical and Translational Science Awards, worth $480 million, would be moved to NCATS
$100 million in first-time funding for a Cures Acceleration Network — new dollars drawn from the NIH increase sought by President Obama in his proposed 2012 budget– would land in NCATS. (The network was authorized at up to half a billion annually in the health reform law of 2010.)
Other NCRR programs, worth a combined $73 million, would move to NCATS.
$24 million in current support for the Therapeutics for Rare and Neglected Diseases (TRND) program would be bumped up to $54 million and relocated from the National Human Genome Research Institute to NCATS.
The $18 million Office of Rare Disease Research would be relocated from the director’s office to NCATS.
The budget chart also provides a detailed look at the dissolution of the NCRR, which was a subject of controversy this winter, as constituents of the research resources center worried about the fate of their programs and the haste of the reorganization.
Whether Congress will embrace the plan now that it has its details remains to be seen. And the answer may be a while in coming: Congress did not finalize the government’s 2011 budget until April this year, halfway through the 2011 fiscal year.