While the National Institutes of Health's process of setting research priorities is essentially sound, a new report calls on the 21 institutes that make up the NIH to seek greater public feedback and to communicate better with Congress when setting those priorities.
The report, assembled by a committee of the Institute of Medicine, was requested by Senate Labor and Human Resources Public Health and Safety Subcommittee Chairman Bill Frist, R-Tenn., who today welcomed the final result.
Frist--a surgeon by profession--requested the report a year ago amid growing concern that NIH's priorities often reflected the lobbying efforts of one disease advocacy group or another. "We look forward to taking the report back to Congress and including it in an NIH reauthorization bill or an appropriations bill," Frist said.
A former congressional aide who closely follows the NIH pointed out that key House chairmen have said there will be no NIH authorization bill this year. Nonetheless, many of the report's recommendations can be implemented administratively rather than legislatively.
The reporting committee's chairman, Leon Rosenberg, acknowledged some diseases, such as breast cancer and AIDS, have received significant attention and funding in recent years. While he said there is no "one-to-one correlation between spending and a cure," he conceded that "resources matter."
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