Posted on 04/04/2022 6:44:41 AM PDT by FoxInSocks
Ned Sharpless, the director of the National Cancer Institute, is stepping down at the end of April, he told STAT.
Sharpless, 55, spent nearly five years leading the roughly $7 billion biomedical research agency, which is the largest of the 27 institutes that compose the National Institutes of Health.
“I strongly support what this [administration] is doing to support cancer research, but it’s time for me to step aside,” he wrote in a text message.
A former professor of medicine at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, Sharpless spent four years as director of UNC’s Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. He’s co-founded two biotechnology companies and is listed as an author on roughly 160 scientific papers, including groundbreaking research on aging, cancer susceptibility, and chemotherapy side effects.
Though Sharpless is a longtime Democrat, according to records of his political donations, he has found success navigating a highly charged Washington since President Trump appointed him in October 2017.
Under his leadership, the institute’s budget grew substantially, from $5.7 billion to $6.9 billion, largely in line with broader NIH funding increases.
And when Scott Gottlieb, the highly popular Trump-era commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, stepped down, the White House tapped Sharpless to serve as acting commissioner for seven months in 2019.
Sharpless also helped to oversee one of the largest public-private partnerships in the NIH’s history, a $215 million effort to advance new immunotherapies used to treat cancer.
As NCI director, Sharpless also made it his mission to raise the percentage of funding applications that the agency approves, setting a goal of funding the top 15% of proposals by 2025. The agency’s “payline” for R01 grants, the NIH’s most common type of funding award, has ticked upward from 8% to 11% in the past three years.
While NIH institute directors sometimes serve de facto life terms, Sharpless’ departure after fewer than five years running the agency is in line with his predecessor, Harold Varmus, who served from 2010 to 2015.
Sharpless’ departure comes amid significant change in the federal government’s scientific strategy and cancer research efforts in particular. Earlier this year, the Biden administration relaunched its “Cancer Moonshot,” the Obama-era effort to accelerate cancer research.
The White House, nonetheless, proposed a nearly $200 million cut to the NCI in its proposed 2023 budget, a nonbinding document that largely serves a symbolic statement of the administration’s values.
While the administration proposed that the NIH’s budget remain largely flat, it instead asked Congress to allocate $4 billion for ARPA-H, Biden’s new high-stakes research agency intended to, among its other missions, “end cancer as we know it.”
Appointed.
I am generally not a fan of auto-correct.
Wonder if Deep State wanting their own stooge in there has anything to do with CoupFlu vaxxes...
The Safety of Anti-SARS-CoV-2 Vaccines: Vigilance Is Still Required
...which led us to suggest that their stimulation by the BNT162b2 vaccine could explain the outbreak of the lymphoma.
Whoakaaaaay....
Save all your emails.
So in 5 years the broader NIH funding increased 21% or roughly 4.2% per year. So government grows at twice the annual inflation rate.
Mebbe this guy notices something stinks and hears the fan starting up — time to go!
See my reply #4.
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