UMass Medical joins call for research funding

UMass Medical School has signed on to a national call for research funding.

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UMass Medical School is among more than 200 medical schools, associations, colleges and others advocating for medical research funding at a time when government funding could be cut.

The alliance, the Ad Hoc Group for Medical Research, took out full-page newspaper advertisements in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal and Politico asking Congress to increase funding by $2 billion to the National Institutes of Health in the upcoming 2018 budget.

The group is not new, but its mission became more critical this month after the Trump administration unveiled a plan to cut the NIH budget from $31.8 billion to $26 billion. The National Cancer Institute, National Science Foundation and others would also face sharp cuts.

That could affect UMass, which relies heavily on government aid. The medical school received more than $143 million in NIH funding in the 12 months ending last September, among the highest for medical schools in the Northeast, according to Blue Ridge Institute for Medical Research in North Carolina.

Massachusetts more broadly also depends heavily on the NIH, according to the institute, with nearly $2.6 billion in funding, the highest on a per-capita basis in the country.

UMass Medical School was one of a few medical schools based in Massachusetts to sign on, along with Harvard, Tufts, Northeastern, Boston University Medical School, and the Andover-based Philips Healthcare North America.