The US Congress approved Friday night a spending bill that would increase the National Institutes of Health's funding by $2 billion for fiscal year 2019, as GenomeWeb has reported.
The appropriations bill approved by a joint House and Senate conference committee would boost the NIH budget by 5.4 percent, which GenomeWeb notes matches what the Senate Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education appropriations subcommittee suggested earlier this summer and is slightly more than what the House appropriations committee earlier proposed for NIH. This new bill would bring the NIH budget to $39.1 billion and this, ScienceInsider adds, exceeds the $34.8 billion requested by the Trump Administration.
In particular, the bill includes $2.34 billion for Alzheimer's disease research, a $425 million boost; $429.4 million for the BRAIN initiative, a $29 million increase; $400 million for the cancer moonshot effort, a $100 million boost; and $376 million for the All of Us precision medicine study, a $86 million increase.
The bill is to go before the full House and Senate for a vote.