(WHTM) -- The newly enacted state budget will take aim at diseases like ALS and Alzheimer's by steering money for research to those conditions with no cures and few treatments.

Typically federal and donor dollars fund such efforts but for the first time state dollars will join the fight.

Lot of lawmakers usually introduce lots of bills but for State Rep. Kyle Mullins (D-Lackawanna) this one's personal.

"I'm also the son of a great man, my dad, Michael Mullins, who died from ALS just over a year ago. So I'm part of this club. I never asked to be part of a club of people who know the devastation," he said.

But he's proudly part of the club trying to do something about neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimers, Parkinson's and Huntington's and the one that took his dad ALS or Lou Gehrig's.

"Sadly, Lou Gehrig's prognosis would be largely the same if he were diagnosed today, 83 years later," Mullins said.

So Mullins wants to steer state money to state research institutions to find cures and treatments.

"This funding is not to initiate research in these fields from scratch," Penn State Health Hershey Dr. Zachary Simmons said, adding that the money will fuel the collaboration between researchers and institutions.

"That would permit sharing of ideas, reduction of duplication and participation of patients throughout the state," Simmons said. "We're all smarter and more productive when working together."

House Republican leader Bryan Cutler lost both parents to ALS, and he's a strong proponent of research grants. So is GOP Rep Val Gaydos.

"Starts with tremors and proceeds into slow movements," Gaydos said. "Deafness, loss of balance." She lost her mom Parkinson's in 2017. "She donated her brain to the brain bank so that they can proceed to look at those tissues to see and advance research."

Advocates hoped for $10 million, but the final budget gave them three. In-state facilities can apply for it.

Penn State Health, Temple, Thomas Jefferson, UPenn, and UPMC Pitt are all institutions currently doing this work with some of the smartest and most talented researchers. I've ever had the pleasure of knowing.

Mullins knows the money he pushed for won't help his dad, but his hope: it saves someone else's. "It's those things that break your heart that can give you hope and that can give you purpose," he said.

The support for this is truly bipartisan as people on both sides know loved ones impacted by the diseases.