A new round of federal funding could help create Houston medical jobs (Click here).

President Barack Obama is proposing that more money be doled out for medical research for such things as cancer and autism. If Congress passes the current budget, $32.3 billion will be given to the National Institutes of Health, which funds research at many medical institutions in Houston and throughout Texas.

According to an article by the Houston Chronicle, the additional funding could be a big boost for the area's economy, which has a major medical research sector. Organizations affiliated with the Texas Medical Center alone provide thousands of research and support jobs, bring world renowned scientists and scholars to the area, and drive innovation.

"NIH is big business (for Houston)," Bill Brinkley, dean of the Baylor College of Medicine Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, said. "I have always been hopeful that (research) money will continue to flow in. It increases the knowledge that we have to fight disease, and it provides a good deal of jobs for high-quality, very intelligent people in our community."

Many research organizations have noted that they would have to cut back without more NIH funding. The University of Texas Health Science Center, for instance, counts on NIH money for 70 percent of its federal funding and about half of its total research funding. About 17 centers at Baylor College of Medicine get some of their funding from NIH.

According to NIH, two diseases that will get the most attention next year are cancer and autism. The budget for cancer research will grow by $255 million, or 4.4 percent, and the budget for autism research will increase to $143 million, or 5 percent. There also will be an increased focus on translational research.

This all means good news for Houston, where Baylor has been urging its researchers to focus on translational research for some time and UT has begun several autism-related projects.