Burke Neurological Institute Receives Over $2.3 Million in NIH Funding
By Natalie Chun
On June 27, Congresswoman Nita Lowey (D-Harrison) announced that more than $2.3 million in federal funding would be awarded to Burke Neurological Institute (BNI) in White Plains.
The Institute was awarded a $466,241 annual federal grant for five years from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study rehabilitation after spinal cord injury.
Dr. Edmund R. Hollis II, Director of the Circuit Repair Laboratory, said that the money would go to the operation of the lab and their experiments, which rely almost entirely on grants.
“The way the academic lab, such as ours, works is that it relies on grant money for funding of everything in the lab and the costs associated with [our research].”
By studying motor learning of animals, Dr. Hollis and his lab are using a molecular approach to understand the plasticity of the brain and its ability to change and learn.
“We’ve designed new behavioral tasks testing of animals that will allow us to understand the specific effects of injury and rehabilitation on the way they use their forelimbs, so the equivalent of our arms and our hands, which is really a critical area of concern for people with cerebral spinal cord injuries,” Hollis said.
“Current day rehabilitation tries to lessen the impairment as best they can,” said Vice President of Institutional Advancement Christine Hughes. “Dr. Hollis and his lab, and the Institute as a whole, is not just trying to regain some function, we’re actually trying to repair and restore. So we’re not teaching them how to use a wheelchair, we’re not teaching them how to use a walker, we’re saying, ‘Let’s repair it so you have full function.’”
Heather Pepper Lane, who works with Upper Limb Motor Recovery Programs, said that many patients she works with come without any function in their arm or wrist, but through BNI’s restorative strategies and tools, they can find success in everyday tasks.
“You think about all the things that you use your arms and your wrists for and, you know, from getting dressed to eating, you know, to writing,” Lane said. “These are all things that we all take for granted, that people are able to assume that part of their normal life.”
Lane talked about several patients who started off in braces without any movement, and eventually are able to do things like brush their teeth or go to work.
“We kind of operate in a very unique space as I think you can tell by all of the NIH funding that we get,” Hughes said, “just a lot of confidence in the work that we do here.”
Congresswoman Lowey has expressed personal investment in biomedical research, particularly in supporting the development of new treatments and cures for debilitating diseases and conditions.
According to a press release, “As Chairwoman of the House Appropriations Committee, she has successfully negotiated an increase of $9 billion for the NIH in the past four fiscal years alone.”
While Burke Neurological Institute did receive a portion of that in grants, a representative for Congresswoman Lowey said that she plays no part in that process.
“NIH research grant applications are awarded through a thorough and competitive process and decisions are made by NIH alone,” Lowey’s Press Secretary Katelynn Thorpe said in an email.
The new grant is also not the only NIH grant that BNI is functioning under. Dr. Hollis alone has been awarded multiple grants including the NIH’s New Innovator Award in 2017, which gave his lab over $2.7 million in funding.“The grants allow us to do our work and so we’re very fortunate to receive funding from both the starting with the Burke Foundation, but then from the NIH, the grants from the NIH and the grants from New York State,” Hollis said. “These allow us to do the science that we think is really critical for advancing our understanding of spinal cord injury and rehabilitation. But also, we hope the tools we develop and the science that we’re doing is going to be applicable across disorders.”
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