A US Senate appropriations subcommittee has approved a $2 billion increase in funding for the National Institutes of Health for fiscal year 2019, as GenomeWeb reports. That, it notes, would be a 5.4 percent boost to the agency's budget and bring its total funding to $39.1 billion.
Last week, a US House of Representatives appropriations subcommittee proposed increasing the NIH budget by 3 percent to $38.3 billion. Both proposals are more than the $34.2 billion the Trump Administration requested for NIH, Science adds.
The Senate subcommittee's budget proposal includes a $425 million boost for Alzheimer's research, bringing it to a total of $2.3 billion; a $29 million increase for the BRAIN initiative, for a $429.4 million total; and a $86 million increase to the All of Us precision medicine study, for a total $376 million budget. It also includes $711 million for the 21st Century Cures Act and $560 million for the Clinical and Translational Science Awards.
The full Senate appropriations committee is to consider the draft bill this Thursday.