US research funding flattens

Excerpts from the Globe's blog on the Boston-area medical community.

Industry research and development dollars have been leveling off at the same time as federal spending for biomedical research has flattened, says the advocacy group Research!America. Support from independent organizations, which account for 2 percent of the $116 billion spent on research in the United States last year, hasn't grown in five years.

The flattening of federal funds has caused concern in Boston, whose teaching hospitals receive a total of about $1.4 billion a year in federal grants.

Transplant pioneer and Nobel laureate Dr. Joseph E. Murray, 88, knows what he'd be researching if he were younger.

"We don't know why, but when multiple tissues, say a limb with bone and muscle and tissue, are transplanted, each of the elements seem to aid in the healing rate of other elements at far greater rates than for skin transplant alone," he told the Vineyard Gazette last week. "If I were a young doctor, that's where I'd concentrate. That work will be fruitful for 50 or 80 years," he said.

Murray performed the first successful kidney transplant in 1954 at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital.

Face transplants may be safer than previously thought, according to a new analysis of their risks, but the encouraging report will not change guidelines adopted by Brigham and Women's Hospital that limit who can have the rare procedure, said Dr. Bohdan Pomahac, a plastic surgeon who directs the Brigham's program and was not involved in the new research.

Researchers from the University of Cincinnati and the University of Louisville say in the journal Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery that an influential British report issued in 2004 overestimated the dangers by failing to take into account three important factors: newer drugs used to prevent rejection, the poorer health of kidney transplant recipients relative to face transplant patients and the different tissue composition of solid organs versus the skin.

Dr. Eric Winer, director of the breast oncology center at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, said he is encouraged that, for the first time in recent memory, cancer is taking center stage in a presidential campaign. Last week, Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Dennis Kucinich, and Bill Richardson and Republican candidates Sam Brownback and Mike Huckabee spoke about their plans for battling cancer at a conference in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, convened by cyclist and cancer survivor Lance Armstrong.

"It seems to me that it is a good thing for sure that this is part of the political debate," Winer said in an interview. "We certainly want cancer to be in the forefront of what the candidates and what Americans are thinking about."

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