New Haven area scientists told their stories to Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro Thursday morning, touting their groundbreaking medical research to the woman who now helps oversee the National Institutes of Health.

“I run a DNA repair lab and I also treat patients with brain tumors,” explained Dr. Ranjit Bindra of the Yale School of Medicine. “We have an NIH funded laboratory.”

The National Institutes of Health funds grants to institutions all over Connecticut. They provided more than $450 million to Yale researchers alone just last year. Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (D-3rd District) got some of those researchers together because the last election made her the Chair of the appropriations subcommitte that oversees the NIH. 

“A breakthrough at the NIH saves not just one life, but potentially millions of lives,” DeLauro said.

You may be thinking, Yale has lots of money, the bioscience industry has lots of money, why do they need NIH funding? Well, these medical breakthroughs tend to start as very small ideas and that funding lets them get over the first couple of hurdles, then they can attract the big venture capital money.

“To really take this alternative to very many people, you have to prove it works in a clinical trial,” said Dr. Paul Turner, a professor at Yale University. “That takes a lot of resources. NIH is one of our go-to agencies for that to happen.”

Turner is working on an alternative to antibiotics, because so many bacteria are becoming drug resistant.

“We looked to an old idea and we updated it,” Turner said. “Pre-dating antibiotics was the discovery of certain viruses called phages that are specific to bacteria and they will kill bacteria instead of these drugs.”

Dr. Bindra’s cancer cure takes advantage of how fast tumors grow.

“They often have breaks in their DNA and they have to put those pieces of DNA back together so they can survive,” Bindra explained. “So if we can block those pathways, we can better target and kill cancer cells.”

David Werzer, the Chief Investment Officer of Connecticut Innovations, state’s venture capital arm, says the NIH is helping a local bio-tech boom.

“New Haven, Branford, have seen substantial growth over the last few years,” said Werzer. “In fact, lab space has become scarce because of the buildup of research and the number of companies that are spinning out of Yale.”

The hope is, those companies will stay in the New Haven area and pump much of that money back into the local economy.