Cohen Announces New $3 Million Precision Medicine Center at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital

[WASHINGTON, DC] – Congressman Steve Cohen (TN-09), co-chair of the bipartisan Congressional Biomedical Research Caucus, today announced two significant federal grants totaling $4,359,985 in funding for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. This funding will be used in large part to create a new Center for Precision Medicine in Leukemia (CPML), while $1,221,256 of it will be used for a Clinical Pharmacogenetics Implementation Consortium (CPIC).

“St. Jude is one of the world’s finest health care institutions and its positon among the leaders in global medicine will only be strengthened by new projects like these that can tailor treatments to individuals and improve outcomes for patients,” said Congressman Cohen. “Since arriving in Congress, I have led the charge for increasing resources available for medical research through the NIH so that we can find new and better treatments and cures. While we more than adequately fund the Department of Defense, we have significantly cut funding for the NIH—a department of defense that protects us from deadly diseases and illnesses—and for biomedical research, preventing and slowing critically important research for cures and treatments for diseases like Alzheimer’s, diabetes, HIV/AIDS, stroke, cancer, and Parkinson’s.”

Congressman Cohen is a leading voice in the U.S. House of Representatives for supporting our nation’s research institutions and has long fought to reverse the devastating effects sequestration has had on biomedical research in America, especially on research funded and conducted by the NIH. In the 113th Congress, the Congressman led a coalition of nearly 50 U.S. Representatives in urging the reversal of a decade-long slide in support for the NIH and Centers for Disease Control (CDC) that has left our nation less prepared to stop the spread of viral diseases and without cures or vaccines for some of the most deadly illnesses. The Congressman also introduced the Research First Act to increase NIH funding for research by more than $1.5 billion, after that funding had been cut by sequestration.

The funding announced today comes through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) National Institutes of Health (NIH).