States rush to fill the NIH funding gap

STAT reports on a growing number of state-level science funding proposals. Massachusetts’ governor has proposed a $400 million DRIVE initiative, a coalition of medical schools and researchers is pushing New York to create a $6 billion Empire Biomedical Research Institute, and Texas voters already approved $3 billion for dementia research modeled on CPRIT (which has disbursed roughly $4 billion in cancer research grants since 2009). Jeff Alexander and Ivy Estabrooke frame the efforts in a recent Science editorial: state involvement in science funding can make institutions more resilient and provide an outlet for experimentation with funding design, but they are no replacement for federal support.