GLI Celebrates Dr. Monica Bertagnolli’s Senate Confirmation as Director of NIH

Global Liver Institute is proud to have been an early supporter of the President’s nominee, Dr. Monica Bertagnolli, as the Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). After nearly 2 years since Dr. Francis Collins left the position, the Senate on a bipartisan vote has now confirmed Dr. Bertagnolli as the new NIH Director. 

Dr. Bertagnolli was the first woman to serve as the director of the National Cancer Institute and before that, as chief of the Division of Surgical Oncology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. She was a professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School and was recently elected to the National Academy of Medicine and served as the president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology

GLI appreciates that Dr. Bertagnolli is a cancer survivor and will continue to drive forward the Cancer Moonshot goals to end cancer as we know it. With her background coming from rural America, she brings to the job a fundamental recognition of the challenges facing people who struggle to access health care. GLI shares her concern that clinical trials need to be more diverse, a significant challenge for liver disease and cancers that disproportionately affect people of color. We are excited to work with Dr. Bertagnolli as she leads NIH with a focus on collaboration, as she has demonstrated in her leadership of the National Cancer Institute. Congratulations Dr. Bertagnolli!

Once this legislation takes effect, it will break up the monopoly that the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) holds over the OPTN to allow for innovation and competition while also enhancing accountability and transparency in the national system.