Gephardt: Medical research can help fuel U.S. economy (Winston Salem Journal) (mentions Metro Mayors)
Medical innovation — fostered with public financing and lighter regulatory burdens — should be “a cornerstone” of the economic recovery, former U.S. Rep. Dick Gephardt told a group North Carolina mayors and biotechnology executives yesterday.
In fact, the health sector is the only major part of the U.S. economy that has grown in the last two years, Gephardt said, adding 700,000 new jobs nationwide.
Gephardt, twice a presidential candidate and a key member of the Democratic Party’s Congressional leadership team for much of his 28 years there, now heads the Council for American Medical Innovation. He’s on a multi-state tour to build support for changes in the way medical research is funded.
Biotechnology programs are expanding across the state, and Winston-Salem has been expanding its downtown Piedmont Triad Research Park in recent years. The Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine, a multi-institute effort led in North Carolina by Dr. Anthony Atala of Wake Forest University, is about to get a $10 million infusion under the state budget that won final passage yesterday.
Mayor Allen Joines of Winston-Salem, a co-chairman of the Metropolitan Mayors Coalition Biotech Committee, said that biotechnology has become “a strong part of our economy.”
Gov. Bev Perdue said that the industry means $46 billion a year to the state’s economy. And between actual industry positions and the ones they help spawn, it means nearly 250,000 jobs, she said.
Gephardt cited a study from the state’s Biotechnology Center that put the total number of jobs at a more modest 182,000 in 2008.
At any rate, Perdue said she wants North Carolina to lead in biotechnology, despite lingering budget problems that have forced state spending cuts in other areas.
The state already has a grant program to help private researchers get their products to market, and it may start a new loan program to help provide more funding. House Bill 530 — which is being debated at the Capitol — would create new state tax credits to help finance loans to medical research groups.
Joines mentioned the bill and said he planned to lobby for it before heading home. And that, in a nutshell, was Gephardt’s call to action for the politicians and business people at Wednesday’s talk: Lobby the state legislature and Congress, make noise for a growing industry.
“It needs to be the new space program, in my view,” Gephardt said.
Specifically, Gephardt’s group is calling for several changes, outlined in a recent report:
• More public-private funding partnerships to cover the enormous costs of medical research.
• Increase a federal tax credit for medical research and make it permanent, rather than something Congress must reauthorize every couple of years. Gephardt said that uncertainty gives private financiers pause, and he called it “ridiculous.”
• More predictability in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s review process.
Gephardt acknowledged that health-care costs have spiraled upward despite the last 50 years of medical breakthroughs, but he said that research and technology remain the surest way to cut health-care costs. He said that delaying the onset of major symptoms for the average Alzheimer’s sufferer by a few years would probably “empty out” half the nursing homes in the United States and save “probably, trillions of dollars.”
“If you don’t have innovation, you’re never going to help health- care costs,” he said.
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By Travis Fain
SPECIAL TO THE JOURNAL
Published: July 1, 2010
RALEIGH
