National health official visits area

The director of the federal National Institutes of Health lauded science’s potential and said biomedical research is making progress against some of humanity’s gravest and rarest diseases during his visit to Northwest Arkansas on Tuesday.

The institutes conduct and support research around the country into such endeavors as tailoring medicine to a patient’s genes, overcoming antibiotic resistance and mapping and understanding the trillions of connections among the brain’s cells, Dr. Francis Collins told students and teachers at two Bentonville schools.

“This is the most exciting time to see that happen,” Collins said at Bentonville High School, adding genebased precision medicine will “transform the practice of medicine.” He later spoke at Fulbright Junior High School and toured the newly opened Arkansas Children’s Northwest hospital in Springdale.

Collins oversees the institutes’ annual spending of more than $30 billion, millions of which go to Arkansas universities and health care providers each year.

His visit came less than two weeks after Congress voted to increase the institutes’ annual budget by about $3 billion dollars despite the Trump administration’s proposal last year to trim it by even more. The administration at the time said some spending went to unproven projects or could be covered by other sources of money, but President Donald Trump signed the recent spending bill.

Third District Rep. Steve Womack, a Republican from Rogers and chairman of the House’s budget committee, said he invited Collins to his district because the institutes spend billions now to save trillions later through medical discoveries.

“It’s going to improve your quality of life, and it’s going to save the taxpayers a lot of money in the long run,” Womack told the Bentonville High crowd.

Collins rose to his position at the institutes in 2009 under former President Barack Obama and was kept on by Trump.

The institutes in recent years helped pay for research into Alzheimer’s disease, infectious diseases and children’s health at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Arkansas Children’s Hospital and the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. The money often goes where private industry dollars aren’t, former UAMS Chancellor Dan Rahn said last year.

“Very important research is funded by private companies, but basic research — game-changing research, really — needs public funding,” Rahn said.

Collins said antibiotics are one example of that need. Tens of thousands of people die each year because their infections can resist every type of antibiotic in use, but Collins said pharmaceutical companies don’t go through the expensive process of finding new antibiotics because they would only be used as a last resort, shrinking the potential market.

“That means NIH, funded by your taxpayer dollars, is the place to step in,” Collins said, noting researchers are making progress by looking for antibiotic compounds in new places such as soil microorganisms.

Collins specializes in genetics and led the multibillion-dollar Human Genome Project that unravelled the human genetic code, the unique molecular threads within cells that provide instructions for building every muscle, blood vessel and nerve. The project has helped researchers find the genetic basis of hundreds of diseases since it finished more than a decade ago, according to the health institutes.

Those genetic diseases often arise from a misspelling of just a few genetic “letters” out of 3 billion in all, Collins said. Cystic fibrosis, a progressive disease that takes away lung function, stems from an error in three letters, for example. Progeria, a rare disease that brings a lifetime of aging and eventual death in one-sixth of the typical time, comes from one wrong letter.

This knowledge opens up new ways to deal with these diseases, Collins said. He guessed sickle-cell anemia, which causes misshapen blood cells, could be cured within a decade thanks to a procedure that tweaks the genetic mistakes behind it, for example. His own laboratory is looking into gene therapy for progeria after testing a drug-based therapy that actually made the condition worse for some patients.

“Research is not one of those things where everything goes well,” Collins said, adding the trick is to learn from mistakes and keep going. “If you’re really working in an interesting area, you should count on failure.”

The subject isn’t an abstract one for Collins. His work on progeria introduced him to Sam Berns, who had progeria and was the subject of the HBO documentary Life According to Sam. Collins spoke about Sam at Fulbright, where the Bentonville Kiwanis Club honored outstanding students from around Benton County.

Sam died at 17 in 2014, according to The Associated Press, but lived a joyful life Collins said touched everyone around him. He came up with several life principles, including focusing on what he could do rather than what he couldn’t, surrounding himself with positive people and never missing a good party.

Collins urged the students at the Kiwanis banquet to remember those lessons and know that they can create a positive legacy no matter their circumstances.

“Very important research is funded by private companies, but basic research — game-changing research, really — needs public funding.”

— UAMS Chancellor Dan Rahn