Inside Stanford Medicine - November 18th, 2009 - by Ruthann Richter
In fields ranging from cardiac disease and cancer to premature birth defects and stem cells, federal stimulus dollars are having an enormous effect on the biomedical research community, creating new jobs and spurring economic growth while reinvigorating programs that could benefit adults and children who face serious illness.
A new Web site, produced by the Stanford University School of Medicine, details the value of the nation’s stimulus program, both in economic and human terms. The site is available at http://med.stanford.edu/stimulus/.
The medical school has received about $86 million to date for 134 projects under the program, known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. It is projected that the funds, which are being allocated through the National Institutes of Health, will create and retain about 200 full-time employee positions at the school by mid-2010, in addition to injecting money into the local economy.
“Stimulus dollars are incredibly important right now,” said Philip Pizzo, MD, dean of the medical school, in an interview on the site. In the last six years, Stanford — and the research community at large — has suffered because of significant declines in NIH funding, he noted.
With stimulus money, “faculty who thought they would have to lay off members of their research team because of the lack of funding are holding onto them,” Pizzo said. “As funding comes in, it’s allowing them to bring on new investigators, technicians and other individuals to help support the programs and really help fulfill the president’s agenda.”
The result is a kind of renaissance for research programs, whose payoff will be in new approaches for treating human disease. For instance, Hugh O’Brodovich, MD, professor and chair of pediatrics at Stanford, describes a new collaborative project, supported by $3.5 million in stimulus funding, that will help enable his team to identify the genetic source of a lung disease in premature infants. The disease keeps babies in costly intensive care units for months and can lead to lifelong respiratory problems.
The ARRA funds, O’Brodovich said, will accelerate research, helping find answers in two years that might have taken a decade or more. “This will enable treatments and new strategies to avoid this disease to be implemented much sooner than we ever dreamed,” he said.