Bio Saga Blog - A Chronicle of Life Sciences & Informatics

President Barack Obama officially has launched the White House Cancer Moonshot Task Force, which will seek to address unnecessary regulatory barriers to developing new cancer treatments. Members of the task force — which will be chaired by Vice President Joe Biden — include the heads of the FDA, HHS, the National Cancer Institute and the National Institutes of Health.  The task force, funded by NIH, will present a report to the president before Dec. 31. Peter Pitts, president and founder of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest and a former FDA associate commissioner, said the president should ask HHS to appoint an innovation czar to make the most of resources. Read the White House memorandum here: www.fdanews.com/01-29-16-MoonshotCuresMemo.pdf .

The US House of Representatives on Friday passed a 2010 budget for the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education that would increase funding for the National Institutes of Health by nearly $1 billion over its appropriation for 2009. The bill, which passed the house by a vote of 264 to 153, seeks an NIH appropriation for 2010 of $30.97 billion, which is an increase of $940 million over the 2009 level, excluding funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. That increase also would boost NIH funding by $500 million over the $30.5 million asked for by President Barack Obama in his budget request. The bill also seeks $6.8 billion for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an increase of $67 million over the 2009 appropriation and $38.4 million over the White House's 2010 request. The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, which supports increased funding for biomedical research , said passage of the bill makes it more like...

The National Institutes of Health will allow the average award value of competing grants for fiscal 2008 to increase by three percent for fiscal 2009, in line with the three percent increase the institutes received under this year's budget appropriation from Congress, NIH said this week. NIH is predicting that this year's appropriation of $30.3 billion from the omnibus spending bill will allow its institutes and centers (ICs) to support approximately 9,800 new and competing research project grants. The ICs are expected to maintain the average number of new investigators as it did in the five most recent years, and to continue to use the NIH Director's Innovator Awards and the NIH Pathway to Independence awards within the common fund. The ICs also are expected to continue to use the NIH Director's Bridge Award Program, which gives continued but limited funding to meritorious investigators whose applications were close to the funding range of the relevant IC, but which ...

At the White House signing this afternoon of an executive order to overturn the previous administration's ban on using human embryonic stem cells in research, US President Barack Obama also signed a memorandum that he said is aimed at insulating science from politics. Obama said today that the Scientific Integrity Presidential Memorandum charges the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy with development of "a strategy for restoring scientific integrity to government decision making." He said that his administration will "base our public policies on the soundest science …[and] appoint scientific advisors based on their credentials and experience, not their politics or ideology." In addition, Obama said that his administration will be "open and honest with the American people about the science behind our decisions." He also said that promoting science is about more than providing resources, but also involves "ensuring that scientif...

Genentech believes a far-sighted approach to patent expiration, unique and life saving drugs and an unrivalled scientific culture will protect it from recession and ensure greater growth than Roche envisions. The comments were made by several Genentech executives at its annual investors meeting, at which the biotech sought to justify its financial model and its belief that Roche’s offer is inadequate. Genentech’s analysis of threats it faces in coming years, and their impact upon the business, included two issues that appeared in President Obama’s budget, namely follow-on biologics and Medicaid reform . Obama backing generic biologics. Ian Clark, executive vice president, commercial, explained that the damage caused by follow-on biologics had been mitigated through planning since 2004. The financial hit that Genentech will take is incorporated into its November financial model but Clark feels that the company is well prepared to face its patent expiration period, which spans 201...

Life sciences will indeed receive a boost in funding in President-Elect Barack Obama's sprawling economic recovery plan, according to figures from the House Appropriations Committee released today. A statement from the committee says that the National Institutes of Health will get $2 billion, the National Science Foundation will receive $3 billion, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will get $462 million. As the 111th Congress squabbled over the finer points of the recovery package, science advocacy and trade organizations voiced their hopes and rallied their membership to ensure that research is not forgotten in the latest efforts to rally the flagging US economy. The figures put forth by the Appropriation Committee fall short of the wish lists put forth by many of these groups. The clearest voice clamoring for increased funding at government life science agencies has come from Research!America. The science advocacy group suggested that an infusion of $11.1 billion...