Vasculitis Research Money - Where Does It Come From?
We learned at the 2010 Vasculitis Symposium that the Vasculitis Foundation (VF) is the number one private funder of clinical research concerning vasculitis. The VF has collected and spent approximately one million dollars on research for vasculitis. That is a step in the right direction. But like any lucky coin, there are two sides. Before you count your laurels folks, lets take time to look at the flip side.
For example, where is the government funding going? Take a look for yourself:
Estimates of Funding for Various Research, Condition, and Disease Categories (RCDC)
"This table displays the annual support level for various research, condition, and disease categories based on grants, contracts, and other funding mechanisms used across the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
At the request of Congress, the NIH embarked on a process to provide better consistency and transparency in the reporting of its funded research. This new process, implemented in 2008 through the Research, Condition, and Disease Categorization (RCDC) system, uses sophisticated text data mining (categorizing and clustering using words and multiword phrases) in conjunction with NIH-wide definitions used to match projects to categories. The definitions are a list of terms and concepts selected by NIH scientific experts to define a research category. The research category levels represent the NIH’s best estimates based on the category definitions."
Look closely. You will not see "Vasculitis" listed on that table.
Crohns Disease gets 58 million. If you have gastrointestinal symptoms, maybe they will learn something that will help you down the road.
Arthritis gets 259 million dollars, and many vasculitis treatments are the so called "red-headed step children" of treatments that were discovered arthritis research. So perhaps that will yield some results that, in a decade or two, maybe, will trickle down as new treatments for vasculitis patients.
