WASHINGTON, D.C. — Today, U.S. Senator Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), Ranking Member of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies (Labor-HHS), announced funding from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to support eight projects at West Virginia University (WVU) Hospitals, Inc., including WVU Medicine Children’s Hospital and the WVU Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute (RNI), as well as an award for the WVU Health Sciences Center.
This funding, which was secured through Congressionally Directed Spending (CDS) requests made by Senator Capito, will be used to expand health care facility space for patients’ treatments, medical research, and administrative areas, renovate labs, and purchase new equipment at WVU Hospitals, Inc.
“I am excited to see the resources I directly advocated for reach WVU Hospitals and Health Science Center. When I visited the brand new Children’s Hospital this past spring, I saw firsthand the standard of care being offered in the Mountain State, allowing children to stay close to home for medical treatment,” Ranking Member Capito said. “The revolutionary Alzheimer’s and Substance Use Disorder (SUD) research taking place at RNI is already changing lives. Further buildout of their infrastructure will allow for interdisciplinary innovation, spurring new methods of treatment and prevention. From facility renovations to providing genetics testing and cellular analysis to studying visual impairment, I couldn’t be prouder to support WVU Hospitals’ mission of delivering researched-base quality care to West Virginians.”
“We are deeply grateful to Senator Capito for her continued support and advocacy for WVU Medicine and its hospitals, especially, in this instance, our flagship academic medical center in Morgantown, WVU Medicine Children’s, and the WVU Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute,” Albert L. Wright, Jr., president and CEO of the WVU Health System, said. “We’re especially excited to expand our cytogenetics lab, the only such lab in West Virginia, by building a new, more advanced one in the former Mylan/Viatris plant, which is now home to the WVU Innovation Corporation. An expanded cytogenetics lab is especially critical as we pursue National Cancer Institute designation for the WVU Cancer Institute.”
“West Virginians suffer from a high rate of vision loss due to the convergence of several health risk factors prevalent in the state including diabetes, obesity, heart disease, and advanced age,” Ming Lei, PhD, Senior Associate Vice President for Research and Graduate Education, WVU Health Sciences, said. “A team of clinicians and scientists at West Virginia University Health Sciences is conducting cutting-edge research to understand the molecular mechanism underlying visual impairment and develop intervention strategies. The new Mass Spectrometer and Transmission Electron Microscope are two critical instruments that will significantly accelerate the team’s pace of discoveries toward preserving and improving the vision health of our population. These new instruments will also provide advanced technical capacity and will allow clinicians and scientists who conduct research on other diseases at the University to better collaborate.”
CDS award details listed below:
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