By Ahmed Aboulenein
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Senate on Tuesday voted to confirm President Joe Biden's pick to run the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Dr. Monica Bertagnolli, filling the director spot at the country's top medical research agency after a vacancy of almost two years.
Bertagnolli, a cancer surgeon, was approved by a bipartisan 62 to 26 vote. The NIH had been without a director since December 2021, when former director Francis Collins retired, ending a 12-year reign.
"Dr. Bertagnolli will use her new role to advance our nation's understanding of disease and ensure that the groundbreaking research that NIH conducts will yield innovative and life-saving treatments," U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a statement.
Becerra thanked Acting Director Dr. Lawrence Tabak for his leadership of the agency during the vacancy.
Since October of last year, Bertagnolli has been leading the National Cancer Institute, the largest component of the NIH. She was previously a surgical oncology professor at Harvard and a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.
She becomes the second woman to serve as a permanent director of the NIH, part of HHS with a budget of about $45 billion in 2022.
Bertagnolli's appointment had been held up for months after Biden nominated her in May by Senator Bernie Sanders, who sought assurances she would take enough steps to lower drug prices through restoring the agency's "reasonable pricing" clause.
The clause had been introduced in 1989 by the NIH to its agreements with the private sector as a response to the high cost of HIV drugs at the time. It required companies to charge a "reasonable" price for products developed with government research. Drugmakers lobbied against the policy, which was revoked in 1995 before it was ever tested.
Sanders, who chairs the Senate health committee, voted against Bertagnolli's appointment after she refused to commit to reinstating the clause.
She takes over the NIH, which oversees 27 institutes, at a time when the agency has come under fire from prominent Republicans in and outside of Congress over its role in the response to the coronavirus pandemic.
In December, Bertagnolli announced she had been diagnosed with early stage breast cancer and would need surgery and possible additional treatment, but added that the prognosis was very favorable.