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Biotech executives and the head of the National Institutes of Health met on Monday at the White House with Vice President Mike Pence and other top officials to defend government-sponsored research after the president’s budget proposal sought deep cuts. President Donald Trump’s administration proposed cutting $1.23 billion from the NIH’s budget this fiscal year and $5.8 billion next year. Most of the proposed 2017 cuts would have come from reductions in research grants. But Congress increased the NIH’s budget for this fiscal year by $2 billion in the spending bill it passed last week to fund the government through September. (Edney, 5/8)

Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, chaired a meeting at the White House on Monday that many research advocates viewed as a chance to oppose the $5.8 billion cut President Trump has proposed for the agency next year. Yet the topic of possible reductions in federal research funding, by Collins’ account, did not come up. ... Advocates for strong federal research funding had characterized the so-called “biotech summit” as a tipping point in their campaign for NIH funding. If the White House seemed willing to back away from NIH cuts altogether, they said, a planned wave of advocacy might be unnecessary, especially in the wake of the 2017 budget deal that included more money for the agency. (Facher, 5/8)

The pricing of pharmaceuticals was among "several elephants in the room" that didn’t come up at a White House meeting Monday on U.S. biomedical research, NIH Director Francis Collins said. Also not discussed at the high level meeting: President Donald Trump’s proposal to cut nearly $6 billion or about one-fifth of NIH appropriations in fiscal year 2018, said Collins, who attended along with top advisers to Trump including Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, HHS Secretary Tom Price and representatives from the drug industry and leading universities and hospitals. (Karlin-Smith, 5/8)