The Friends of the National Institute on Aging has sent a letter to Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D., director of the National Institutes of Health, urging for an inclusion of an additional $500 million in the FY 2016 NIH Budget to support aging research. Its FY 2015 budget allocated about $2.5 billion for aging research.
The letter noted, “We believe that this funding is the minimum essential to sustain research needed to make progress in attacking the chronic diseases that are driving significant increases in our national healthcare costs. The institutes that make up the NIH, in particular the National institute on Aging (NIA), lead national scientific efforts to understand the nature of aging in order to promote the health and well-being of older adults, whose numbers are projected to increase dramatically in the coming years due to increased life expectancy and the aging of a baby boom generation.”