December 01, 2025
Douglas A. Girod, MD, chancellor of the University of Kansas, hosted U.S. Senator Jerry Moran and Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Nov. 21 on the KU Medical Center campus in Kansas City.
The group toured several laboratories that focus on cancer research as well as those examining brain health. They also answered questions from media at the Hemenway Life Sciences Innovation Center on the KU Medical Center campus.
"What we focus on today is the opportunity to give hope and ultimately cures and treatments to individuals and families across Kansas, across the country and certainly across the Kansas City region,” Moran said. “I want Kansas to be a place where there is research, where there is science, where there is mathematics and technology that are all designed to solve the world's problems, move our country forward, both economically and for our national security,” he said.
The morning was dedicated to tours and discussions around research at KU Cancer Center, which achieved comprehensive status from the National Cancer Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health, in 2022. The afternoon was dedicated to tours and discussions around research related to the KU Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, designated by the National Institute on Aging, another division of the NIH. Broader discussions on research and potential treatments associated with brain health also were on the agenda.
"All of our research is really supported tremendously by the work of the NIH and has been for many decades,” Girod said. “The NIH is the biggest funder of scientific research in the world, and nobody else can replace that. So, we're hopeful that that support will continue, and we're glad you're here thinking about how centers in the center of the country can have an impact as well."
Multiple researchers, graduate students and fellows had the opportunity to discuss their work and demonstrate significant findings during the tour, which encompassed numerous laboratories in multiple buildings.
"I'm incredibly impressed by the energy, by the intelligence and the clear effort and ingenuity that have gone into making KU a premier center,” Bhattacharya said. “The kind of science that is going on here has the potential to transform how we treat diseases that are fundamentally causing so much suffering in the American people,” he said.
"And for the NIH to be successful, for the United States to be successful, for us to remain the leading nation in the world in biomedicine, it is absolutely vital that research centers across the country have access to the kind of facility support, the training support and the research support that the NIH provides,” Bhattacharya said.
This article originally appeared on the University of Kansas Medical Center's website.