Congratulations to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation which this week celebrated the 25th anniversary of one of its most successful initiatives, the Harold Amos Medical Faculty Development Program (AMFDP).

Harold Amos, PhD

AMFDP is designed to increase “the number of individuals from historically underrepresented groups who achieve senior-level rank in academic medicine.”  It is based at Indiana University. Each year, AMFDP awards up to twelve 4-year postdoctoral research grants to physicians from disadvantaged backgrounds who want to establish careers in academic medicine.  Scholars receive an annual stipend of $75,000, and another $30,000 goes to their medical school.

AMFDP has graduated 181 scholars to date. More than 80% remain in academic medicine, including 35 professors. Recently, Harold Amos Scholar Dr. Lisa Cooper received a Genius Award from the MacArthur Foundation for her efforts to improve communication between patients and physicians.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has invested more than $110 million in the project since its inception in 1983. The Foundation renamed the project 5 years ago to honor Harold Amos, PhD, the first African American chair of a department at Harvard Medical School and a founding advisor for the program.

More information on AMFDP can be found here.

The stage seems set for India to become the worldwide center of pharmaceutical R & D. It has more than a billion citizens, many of whom need health care and will gladly participate in clinical trials. It also has a huge pool of scientists who work for a pittance compared with salaries in the US and Europe. Some predict that India will host as much as 15% of the world’s clinical trials by 2011, even though it hosted only 1% in 2005.

Mumbai’s Piramal Life Sciences was incorporated recently to leverage this opportunity. But Piramal is doing clinical trials in Canada these days.

India’s exasperatingly complex regulatory system it turns out, cannot support rapid growth in pharmaceutical R & D, at least not yet. India doesn’t have enough experts to interpret results from animal experiments for example, and this delays progression to human testing.

India’s regulatory bureaucracy is itself an even larger problem. The unwieldy system is a remnant of India’s brief flirtation with socialist principles after gaining independence in 1950. It has been contemptuously labeled the “license Raj.”

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When both houses of Congress approved bills last week requiring insurers to provide mental health benefits equivalent to those for physical illness, advocates who had worked 10 years to enact such legislation lauded it as a major step forward.

But the House and Senate versions differed, and the legislative session was coming to a close. It wasn’t clear Congress would act quickly enough to have something on the President’s desk before adjournment.

Subsequently the credit markets froze, the House turned Paulson’s 3 page scheme into a 240 treatise before voting it down, and the markets dropped like a stone.

The Senate had to clean up the mess, and thanks to a handful of clear headed, dedicated people  who seized the moment, the Senate’s version of the mental health bill became part of the bailout legislation (see page 310 out of 451) that it passed on Wednesday.

Now it’s on to the House. 

Terrific work right there by people who know how to get things done in Washington. There are some who will point to enactment of this mental health legislation as the crowning achievement of their careers. These people are, of course, “all in” on the bailout.  We wish them luck!