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As NIH Faces Funding Pinch, Medical Researchers Face Tougher Time Obtaining Grants

Posted on: Friday, 2 December 2005, 21:00 CST

By Claude Solnik

Medical researchers are facing a tougher time obtaining grants from the National Institutes of Health due to an increase in competition and a decrease in funding.

Local research institutions said they're facing a pinch as the NIH tightens its purse strings.

The North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System got $20.1 million in NIH research grants in 2004, down from $25.5 million in 2003. About 60 percent of North Shore-LIJ's research funds come from the NIH.

It's critically important, and we're not getting enough, said Bettie Steinberg, chief scientific officer for the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research, formerly the Institute for Medical Research at North Shore-LIJ. It's much less than in the past.

Stony Brook University's funding is flat at about $250 million in awards, including all multi-year grants. It is, however, seeing expenses rise.

Gail Habicht, vice president for research at Stony Brook University, said increased competition is making it difficult to score grants.

From 1998 to 2003, Congress nearly doubled NIH funds to $27.1 billion through a string of double-digit increases. A smaller hike in 2004 pushed funding to $28 billion.

But 2005 funding rose only 1 percent to $28.6 billion, a decrease including inflation.

President George W. Bush requested about $28.8 billion for 2006, another decrease once medical inflation is taken into account.

And Congress hasn't yet approved that budget, which remains stalled as part of a larger human services, education and labor bill.

For now, NIH is operating under provisional funding.

Whatever they had last year, they're allowed to keep spending at last year's rate, said Peter Bond, deputy director for science and technology at Brookhaven National Laboratory, which got about $11.5 million in 2005.

The NIH said it's cautious in awarding funds, since it doesn't know its budget.

Right now we don't know how much we're going to get, so we're being very conservative in the number of applications we're funding, said Norka Ruiz Bravo, NIH's deputy director for extramural research. Unless you know what you're going to get in the end, you tend to be more careful.

The NIH reviewed 73,000 applications in 2005, more than double the 38,000 in 1998 and up from 68,000 in 2004.

While 32 percent of applications were funded in 2001, that slipped to 25 percent in 2004 and 22 percent in 2005. Twenty-one percent are expected in 2006.

North Shore-LIJ and Stony Brook are trying to pick up the tab for projects left in limbo. Habicht of Stony Brook said they're providing short-term funding to keep studies going. Some, she added, are still being dropped.

Source: Long Island Business News

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