WASHINGTON — Christopher Austin was the first director of a then-tiny National Institutes of Health department with an opaque name, the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences. Now, a few years out of the job, he’s got a new task: Make sure Congress doesn’t forget about it.
The NCATS Alliance quietly launched this spring with Austin as a director alongside a handful of rare disease and research hospital advocates. The new lobby is pressing Congress to give the institute, which is tasked with turning lab discoveries into usable medical practices, a 16% funding bump in 2024, a figure that would push its budget just over $1 billion. It is an ambitious request as Congress navigates budget caps installed with the debt ceiling agreement — and growing Republican frustration with the National Institutes of Health’s sweeping research universe.
As Austin notes, the additional funding still wouldn’t put NCATS close to a shiny new agency tasked with some of the same goals. The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, a project close to President Biden’s heart, has a $1.5 billion budget this year, and Biden is asking for $2.5 billion in 2024.