U.S. Rep. Stephanie Bice hosted the director of the National Institutes of Health for a tour Friday of the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation.
A physician and health economist, Jay Bhattacharya, M.D., Ph.D., is the 18th director of the NIH, the world’s largest public funder of medical research. He is the first NIH director since 2004 to visit Oklahoma, which currently has $165 million in active NIH projects.
The bulk of that figure is concentrated in Bice’s congressional district in Oklahoma City, home to the state’s two largest medical research facilities, the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center and OMRF. Scientists compete nationwide for grants from the NIH, and in fiscal year 2024, OMRF researchers received nearly $50 million in NIH funding, with projects spanning from Alzheimer’s to heart disease.
Under Bhattacharya’s leadership, the NIH is focused on tackling the epidemic of chronic diseases. “Chronic diseases such as cancer, heart disease, diabetes and obesity continue to cause poor health outcomes in every community across the U.S.,” he said. “Novel biomedical discoveries that enhance health and lengthen life are more vital than ever to our country’s future.”
Bhattacharya met with scientists researching a wide range of chronic health conditions, from age-related muscle loss to arthritis and autoimmune diseases. He also toured labs and scientific facilities, including OMRF’s new Center for Biomedical Data Sciences.
The center was made possible through a congressional community project request led by Bice and U.S. Rep. Tom Cole of Moore and supplemented by private fundraising.
“Medical research thrives as the result of public-private partnerships like those Director Bhattacharya saw today in Oklahoma and that serve as the gold standard for discovery and innovation,” Bice said.
For President Andrew Weyrich, Ph.D., Bhattacharya’s visit provided a welcome opportunity to highlight the groundbreaking science going on in Oklahoma. “When people think about medical research, they often don’t realize that OMRF is one of the world’s leaders in studying conditions like aging and autoimmune diseases. Or they may not know that our work has led to life-changing drugs and tests for conditions like sickle-cell disease, lupus and rheumatoid arthritis,” he said.
Those advances and others, said Weyrich, are directly attributable to funding provided by the NIH. “Thanks to the NIH, the U.S. stands at the center of the world’s biomedical research stage,” he said. “With leaders like Dr. Bhattacharya and congressional champions like Representative Bice, we are poised to continue making groundbreaking discoveries that improve people’s lives.”
