Post Bulletin
By Dené K. Dryden
ROCHESTER — U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar paid a visit to the University of Minnesota Rochester campus on Monday, March 17, to highlight the possible impacts to the campus and its partners if research funds from the National Institutes of Health are reduced.
"We hope we get the luck of the Irish with our NIH grants here," Klobuchar said, in reference to the St. Patrick's Day holiday.
Klobuchar's Rochester appearance came just a few days after the U.S. Senate passed a spending bill that averted a government shutdown. Some Democratic senators, including Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, voted with Republicans to pass that bill.
Klobuchar, a Democrat, said one of the reasons she voted against the spending bill is because it includes cuts to NIH to the degree of "over a billion dollars just over six months."
"I always believe that we can make government work more efficiently and more effectively," she said. "But this slash-and-burn idea where we just go across the board cannot be the right result."
The National Institutes of Health is one of the largest funders of medical research in the world, supplying grants to universities, hospitals and companies to carry out studies and clinical trials.
A communications freeze on federal health agencies just after President Donald Trump's inauguration and several canceled study sections — meetings of experts who review grant applications — has resulted in uncertainty. Some universities have paused hiring or even rescinded Ph.D. admission offers, in the case of the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School.
Minnesota's research institutions currently receive more than $900 million in NIH funding.
"NIH funding generates over $1.7 billion of annual economic activity and supports nearly 3,400 businesses and 8,000 jobs," Klobuchar said. "Jeopardizing this puts these jobs and businesses at risk."
Though the University of Minnesota system receives the largest share of the state's NIH grants, UMR Vice Chancellor Paul Hanstedt said his faculty's research mostly focuses on teaching and student outcomes, so his campus doesn't see as many NIH dollars.
Reduced funding to Mayo Clinic, though, could impact UMR students. Mayo Clinic is Minnesota's second-largest NIH grant recipient.
"Eighty percent of our students have some substantive interaction with Mayo Clinic, either as an internship, a shadowing, an observation, mentoring or actual research," Handstedt said.
Post-graduate opportunities could be at risk if NIH grants are canceled, said Gerrit Vansteenbergen, career enrichment coordinator at UMR.
"We have a couple of programs specific for post-baccalaureate students that center around Mayo Clinic opportunities and Hormel Institute opportunities," Vansteenbergen said. "If we do see a cut in NIH funding, we ... believe that those could potentially be cut and would impact our students."
The potential impact could be felt by clinical trial participants, too — Klobuchar said she recently spoke with two women who are currently enrolled in clinical trials through the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus.
"They themselves are experiments to save the lives of people they will never even meet, but it's actually saving their lives as we speak," Klobuchar said.
"We're reaching this crescendo where we actually can find a cure for cancer, and already are finding treatments that are working," Klobuchar continued. "This is the very last time we should be going backwards."
UMR is the youngest University of Minnesota campus with a student body of less than 1,000. Its two bachelor's degree programs and four graduate programs center around medical science and health care administration.