As foreshadowed by President George W. Bush's proposed budget for fiscal year 2004, the University Health System and medical research initiatives will go through many changes in the next few years.
On Jan. 23, the U.S. Congress passed the spending bill for fiscal year 2004, and the rapid increase in funding for the National Institutes of Health came to an end this year.
Health System officials, however, had already predicted the change in funding for the coming year and have said that the School of Medicine will continue to have success.
The NIH is a government-run agency that sponsors a significant amount of medical research in America. Over the past five years, it has seen a 15 percent growth in budget each year, doubling its size to approximately $28 billion a year.
The Medical School is the second-largest recipient of money from the NIH, receiving 80 percent of its funds from the agency. In 2002, the Medical School received about $420 million from the NIH, behind only Johns Hopkins University, which received approximately $510 million.
However, between 2003 and 2004, the amount of money allocated to this institution will only increase by 3.1 percent, according to an NIH press release, and in the president's proposed budget for 2005, the increase will be 2.6 percent.
Although the large yearly increases in funding will no longer be seen, officials from the Medical School are not worried. Vice Dean for Research and Research Training Glen Gaulton said last month that the increases would only cover the costs of inflation, but that the Health System is prepared to react to the changes.
To aid programs in the allocation of this money, the NIH is initiating a move toward a new kind of medical research through a program called "The Roadmap for Medical Research," with the hope of speeding up the process of drug discovery and clinical use.
In fiscal year 2004, the NIH will allocate $128 million to the Roadmap initiative, and this will increase again in 2005 to $237 million.
"We believe success will be high because it is a very well thought out, modern approach to research teams of the future," NIH spokesman Marc Stern said last month.
Stern added that by instituting the Roadmap, the NIH hopes "to maximize use of tax money," and "put it to immediate and complete good use."
