Gov. Chris Gregoire has been in the thick of the health care reform talks in the other Washington. To hear her tell the story, she has been talking with President Obama’s top health policy aide, Nancy Ann DeParle, U.S. Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and one of the leading Senators on health reform, Senator Max Baucus of Montana.
Gregoire has been so busy with the DC power elite, and dealing with a recent economic report that said the state’s economy has hit “rock bottom,” that I heard some scuttle she might try to phone it in at her own annual Governor’s Life Sciences Summit in Seattle this morning.
But there she was at McCaw Hall in Seattle at 8 am, letting a crowd of at least 100 people brought to together by the Washington Biotechnology & Biomedical Association know she’s still a believer in their work to build up the state’s cluster of companies that develop new drugs, medical devices, and diagnostics.
“We ought to remain committed to the Life Sciences Discovery Fund and what it can do for the public,” Gregoire said.
This spring, Gregoire and the legislature gave skeptics some reason to doubt the state’s commitment, when the fund was dealt a 41 percent cut over the current two-year budget cycle. The program, which pays for research projects in the state that have commercial potential, was originally projected to be a 10-year, $350 million program that uses money from the state’s tobacco settlement. But the Life Sciences Discovery Fund will now get $19.5 million per year over the next two years because of the state’s budget cuts, said executive director Lee Huntsman.
Interestingly, Gregoire’s justification for the program appears to have shifted. For years, this program was sold as an engine of job creation and prosperity for Washington state—which is finding it increasingly tough to pass the straight-face test when the unemployment rate has topped 9 percent, and even some of the strongest life sciences companies have been slashing payrolls. This morning, Gregoire shifted her message to talk more about the payoff for human health.
She told one anecdote about a police officer, Ray Blackwell. He suffered a brain hemorrhage that’s often fatal, but he survived after being treated by David Newell, the executive director of the Swedish Neuroscience Institute in Seattle. Newell was one of the early winners of state grant support—$169,532—to treat intracranial hemorrhages with an experimental procedures that uses a catheter loaded with enhanced ultrasound, combined with a common clot-busting drug, to gently dissolve the clot over a 24-hour period without causing complications.
The story has two local angles because not only is Newell a local doc getting state support
