WASHINGTON – On Tuesday, U.S. Senator Roy Blunt (Mo.), the top Republican on the Senate Appropriations Subcommitteeon Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies, delivered remarks at the grand opening of the Roy Blunt NextGen Precision Health Building at the University of Missouri.
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Following Are Blunt’s Remarks:
“Thank you. What a great day! Even the weather, perfect today. And such a great moment to be here with you. President Choi, thank you for all you did to associate me with this building. And particularly thanks to the Board of Curators for that honor. But also to the Board of Curators—this one and the ones that served before—to really have a vision for the difference that this building could make to this university and, as Congresswoman Hartzler said, to the whole world.
“Things will happen here that will impact people all over the world because of what the university committed itself to and will happen in ways that they wouldn’t havehappened otherwise. And so I’m grateful to you. I’m grateful that Abby could be here today and my son Andy and my daughter Amy. Two of my grandchildren, Eva and Davis, representing everybody else in our family.
“Abby and Diane and Francis and I are good friends. In fact, I remember that 14 years ago report you got back because you were sitting by Abby at a dinner that we wereall at that evening. And on the way home, she explained to me what the report showed and what you were going to do about it and what you were going to tell your brothers and sisters they should do about it. And then she told me what I should do about it whichwas even worse. You know, a great Missourian, Mark Twain said, ‘there’s nothing more frustrating than a good example.’ And that was a time when that was exactly true, that I was frustrated and my behavior was challenged by your decision to do the right thing.
“But, Francis, it’s so great to have you here today. Your leadership in this whole area of research and medicine is so important. You know, Dr. Collins led the Human GenomeProject, the project that I think at the time we thought we might get done in a generation. And in less than a decade, that project is completed in a way that allows us to look at all other things.
“And by the way, after completing that project, another important part of Dr. Collins’ life is his faith. And that led to a book he wrote called The Language of God andthe sense that, no matter how much we think we know, this couldn’t have just all happened accidentally. And one of the unique things that Dr. Collins has done is be a great advocate for science and a great advocate for faith at the same time. And I know that’sone of the things he wants to focus more of his time on as he moves to what comes next.
“When I started chairing the committee that Dr. Collins referred to seven years ago, one of the first things I had a chance to do was go to Philadelphia, to the Universityof Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, where Dr. Carl June was working on a project with about 70 individuals from, I believe, a 10-year-old girl to a 72-year-old man. Not the first person to think about immunotherapy and what it might do, but the first person towork with 70 or so people to see what difference this might make.
“This is seven years ago. There are 70 people in the United States part of a immunotherapy effort to see what can happen. And here’s—you know, within three years of thatdate, immunotherapy was one of the basic checklist things for all the blood-related cancers. It was the first real, national effort.
“Dr. Collins came to our committee with presentations like you saw today, talking about the importance of ramping up that CAR-T resistance as he said. All of us have,somewhere in us, the ability to fight anything that would attack us. But successful attackers overcome what you have that helps you fight back. And what we’re learning to do now is how to figure out how individually we can make it more capable and more likelyto be able to win that fight in fighting back.
“The mRNA vaccine, developed largely built on decades of NIH research, the first vaccine, I think, that didn’t give you a dose of the disease and make you immune thatway, but alerted your system on what to look for and how to fight back when your system saw that.
“All huge breakthroughs in what can happen. In fact, in that case, we think that generally if in a COVID-19-like variant in the future, maybe within 60 days or 90 days,you could have a vaccine, not the three years we would have expected two years ago or the nine months we miraculously saw happen with an intense effort to get this done. But within a few weeks, identify the marker, figure out what to do about it, make it availableso that people could immediately start that personal fight in fighting back.
“And when we started talking about how NIH research really hadn’t grown in a decade, not even at the inflationary level, and we’re going to make that a priority. A bigproblem with young researchers being unsuccessful, competing with veteran researchers for a pile of money that was about 22% less than it had been a decade earlier and just simply leaving the research field.
“And I think that 43% increase over six years—the 70% increase, I believe, Dr. Choi, on this campus—makes a difference in people doing what they can to try to stay ina field that can be very frustrating because a lot of research projects don’t produce the result you hoped for. But you don’t even get to find that out if you don’t get the assistance you need.
“So the idea of research, the idea of personalized medicine, I think this puts the University of Missouri at the very front ranks of where medicine is today and will bein the foreseeable future. What the Board of Curators decided to do, what the administration decided to do, President Choi’s commitment that we’re going to spend more money here than we spent on any building ever before and make it a place where researcherswant to come, a place that students want to be part of, and a place where partnerships, like those that have been talked about today, will occur that just simply wouldn’t have happened otherwise. And if they did happen otherwise, they wouldn’t have happenedhere.
“It’s a big moment for our state. Obviously, it’s a big moment for me and my family. I am grateful to be associated with such a forward-reaching project of such greatpotential. To be able to work for Missourians for four decades and look forward to another 15 months of doing that, really important to me. But it’s hard to imagine a highlight greater than this one.
“Thank you for sharing this moment with me and including me as part of the future of this great facility and a contact and a relationship with the University of Missouriat Columbia that, growing up, I couldn’t have imagined possible. Thank all of you.”