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Research NewsUniversities Team Up to Urge
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Dr. Brent Iverson, Warren J. and Viola Mae Raymer Professor and Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at The University of Texas at Austin, testified before the U.S. Senate Appropriations subcommittee on March 19 in Washington, D.C. |
The report cited research made possible by the doubling of NIH research funding in previous years and warned that the proposed flat funding would curtail progress that was being made in university labs across the country.
In his testimony, Iverson said that the previous increase in NIH research funding provided him and collaborators to develop a new method for engineering better antibodies. He warned that with flat funding, there was little support for innovative research. He also noted that educational and training opportunities for students would be reduced if chances of receiving NIH grants are diminished.
The universities and institutions involved in the report were: The University of Texas at Austin, Harvard University, the University of California, Washington University in St. Louis, Columbia University, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Yale University and Partners Healthcare, based in Boston.
Testimony of Dr. Brent Iverson
Professor, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
U.S. Senate Appropriations subcommittee
National Institutes of Health 2008 budget
March 19, 2007
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Hello, my name is Dr. Brent Iverson and I am from The University of Texas at Austin. I am here representing NIH funded scientists at research universities. I was an undergraduate business major at Stanford until I worked in Professor Jim Collman’s NIH-funded chemistry research laboratory. My undergraduate research experience charted the course that directly led to my scientific career.
My research spans the interface of organic chemistry and molecular biology, on the basic science end of the medical research spectrum. I am an inventor on 20 patents, many of which are being used by companies.
I would like to make three points concerning the importance of growing the NIH budget. The first point concerns being able to take full advantage of what the budget doubling allowed us to initiate. In my own lab, the increased funding provided by the doubling allowed my collaborators and I to develop a powerful new method we call APEx that is capable of engineering better antibodies.
Antibodies are the hottest segment of the pharmaceutical industry today, with over 20 now approved such as Avastin and Herceptin, for treating colon and breast cancer and Remicade and Humira for treating rheumatoid arthritis. Antibody drugs are so-called targeted therapies, because they are capable of seeking out and attacking only their intended disease targets with remarkable precision, sort of the “smart bomb” equivalent of a drug. The result is a much more concentrated therapy, one that limits many of the serious side effects of traditional approaches.
Our APEx method allows us to make existing antibodies more powerful by a factor of 10 or even 100 or more. For example, we started with an antibody against anthrax that could delay but not prevent death in animals exposed to live anthrax spores. After making the original anthrax antibody about 20 times more potent, our engineered antibody prevented illness and cured animals treated with the same lethal dose of live anthrax spores. That antibody is being pursued commercially by Elusys Inc. of New Jersey and will hopefully become a stockpiled countermeasure that should be effective past the point at which Cipro alone works.
With APEx, we are ready to start working on engineered antibodies that attack a variety of disorders such as allergies, inflammatory diseases and cancer. I believe there are many, many researchers like me, poised to make a difference, with all the tools now in place, but limited by a flat budget. This is not the time to pull back.
My second point concerns basic science breakthroughs. Flat funding as we have now has the effect of making grant-funding decisions overly conservative. Let me bottom line it for you, there is currently too little support for innovative, risk taking basic research without new money, because the money we are given largely goes to fund the many worthy older ideas. Less than 10 percent of the grants in my research area receive money each round. There is simply not enough money left for new ideas that are not yet proven. In other words, there is not enough money for new ideas that could establish new paradigms or provide opportunities for new therapies: exactly the kind of basic science research that cannot be done in the commercial sector.
Conservative funding decisions mean there is also not enough money to fund those scientists who have not yet had the opportunity to prove themselves, namely new faculty members. Further, our current graduate students are being dissuaded from an academic research career by the difficulty young faculty are having in receiving funding right now.
I would like to finish by describing my concerns about science education. I hope all of you understand that the product of NIH funding is not only the research itself, but additionally, the training of students. For the U.S. pharmaceutical and biotech industries, NIH is by far the most important sponsor of projects that result in scientist training. Talk about economic leveraging!
I generally accept 3-4 new Ph.D. students in my laboratory every year. With a significantly reduced chance of getting a grant funded, I am forced to take proportionately fewer graduate students. In fact, I am not accepting a single new graduate student this year in my antibody-engineering lab.
Tight funding impacts undergraduate research opportunities as well. I have had more than 100 undergraduates work in my lab. Across our campus, around 1,000 undergraduates will take part in cutting edge scientific research, many in state-of-the-art labs with NIH funding. Fewer research grants means fewer opportunities for undergraduate researchers.
Taken together, this is an ominous combination; not enough money to take advantage of recent advances, a conservative research environment that discourages risk taking, and not enough support for state-of-the-art science education. I am convinced that a lack of new money today will have a crippling effect on our global competitiveness and will limit medical breakthroughs for decades.
