New funding for medical research may be the least-controversial health item President Obama included in his 2017 budget request Tuesday.
Following through on proposals he already made in last month’s State of the Union address, Obama asked Congress to provide $1 billion in new cancer research funding and $33 billion for biomedical research efforts, including his initiatives to study the brain and precision medicine.
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Congress could be open to providing those funds, given that lawmakers have expressed a recent willingness to direct more dollars toward medical research. Last year, members approved a big funding boost for the National Institutes of Health in its year-end spending bill.
Now Obama wants more dollars for his “cancer moonshot” initiative, led by Vice President Joe Biden, who lost his son to brain cancer last year. As the biggest portion of funding in the $1 billion, $755 million would be provided as mandatory funding for new cancer-related research at NIH and the Food and Drug Administration.
The ultimate goal of the “moonshot” initiative is to “eliminate cancer as we know it,” the budget request says.
The $33 billion for biomedical research would be used to provide about 10,000 new grants from NIH to scientists conducting research that helps them better understand the fundamental causes and mechanisms of disease.
Obama announced two big efforts in that direction last year. His BRAIN initiative and a precision medicine initiative where he wants to create a huge new biobank with the genetic material of one million Americans.
