Dean's Newsletter
Archive of previous newsletters
Dramatic increase in NIH funding for FY07: We're doing something right!
October 26, 2007
The federal fiscal year ended on September 30, 2007 and the results are in. During a year when the national NIH budget was flat, NIH funding to the School of Medicine & Dentistry rose by 12%, increasing our ranking to #25 among U.S. medical schools. What a tribute to our faculty! During a year when Study Section pay lines for grants plummeted, our faculty secured more NIH grants than ever.
This year, as best we can tell, the NIH will no longer report a national list of school-specific results. State-by-State data reported on the NIH website permit calculation of total awards from NIH grants during the previous fiscal year. Of note is that these data do not include contracts, which have historically been combined with grants in the NIH rankings of awards to medical schools.
On the basis of such calculations, FY07 NIH awards totaled $151,866,313, compared with $134,809,734 for FY06. This represents a 12.65% increase. Based on similar calculations for other medical schools, the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry has a FY07 ranking of #25 among U.S. medical schools.
If NIH contracts were included, as determined from internal SMD accounts, FY07 NIH awards totaled $159,362,995, compared with $142,380,663 for FY06, an increase of 11.93%. Since contracts are not reported in the NIH website, a ranking among schools for "total" NIH awards (i.e., grants plus contracts) cannot be calculated.
Clearly, we're doing something right. In fact, from my perspective we've been doing something right for quite some time, with last year's results reflecting the cumulative impact of the investments we've been making in research for a decade. Thus, to tell only the story of what happened last year (the number and dollar amounts of new grants, renewals, etc.) would give a very myopic view. I will therefore reach back to provide an historical perspective, focusing mainly on events since the 1996 Strategic Plan, before ending with some specific data on this past fiscal year.
As recently as 1988, the School of Medicine & Dentistry was ranked 14 in NIH funding among U.S. medical schools (see Figure 1 below), with about $60 million in NIH grant support during that year. In the early 1990s, perhaps because of a conservative posture induced by a phase of NIH history in which pay lines were tight, the rate of new research faculty hires at SMD greatly diminished. Some investigators were recruited away to other medical schools. Research space remained fixed in amount and laboratories were largely unrenovated. During this period, NIH funding remained approximately constant at about $60 million, leading to a comparative reduction in NIH funding relative to other medical schools. By 1995, our NIH ranking had declined to 29 (Figure 1).
Figure 1. from NIH website (FY06 & FY07 rank is unofficial and excludes contracts)
Recognition of these trends as a significant problem for the University of Rochester Medical Center was a fundamental insight of Jay Stein, MD, then Senior Vice President for Health Affairs and Medical Center CEO. In 1996, working closely with Lowell Goldsmith, MD (then Dean of SMD), Larry Tabak, DDS, PhD (then Senior Associate Dean for Research), Michael Goonan (CFO of the Medical Center, then a newly created position bridging the budgets of SMD, SMH and the other URMC divisions), and Peter Robinson (Medical Center COO), Jay and this team brought together the department chairs and the research faculty to envision a plan for re-energizing the overall research mission at SMD. A number of retreats were held to develop an overall strategy, aided by Betty Oppenheimer and her planning staff. From this process, a Strategic Plan emerged and was approved by the UR Board of Trustees in October, 1996.
The 1996 Strategic Plan called for new interdisciplinary research centers, new and renovated lab space, and recruitment of new faculty. The first new research building since the 1970s was planned. Funding came from several sources: a newly established annual transfer of funds from SMH to SMD to support the recruitment of research faculty (the first time this had occurred); a new 1% assessment on collections from SMD's faculty practice (URMFG); New York State (GeNYSis); and philanthropy.
Design began on what is now called the Kornberg Medical Research Building (KMRB), our 240,000 sq ft laboratory facility named in honor of Arthur Kornberg, MD, 1959 Nobel Laureate and SMD Class of 1941. Meanwhile, to begin the process of faculty recruitment, 165,000 sq ft of laboratory space was renovated in the S wing, the G wing and in some of the older medical school areas such as 1-6500. Within the constraints imposed by the existing space footprint, by floor-to-ceiling heights, and by other historical space idiosyncrasies, these renovations were designed to create an open-lab environment that would presage the layout of lab space in the new research building. The Kornberg MRB was opened in 1999, and was soon followed by the Medical Research Building "Extension" (MRBX), a 140,000 sq ft addition opened in 2001. Thus, a total of 545,000 sq ft of new research lab space came on line between 1997 and 2001. Center Directors were hired. A sense of excitement was in the air. We were on our way.
For all the reasons outlined above, investment in research was the right move. In retrospect, for reasons that weren't entirely foreseen, the timing couldn't have been better. Unbeknownst to us at the time of planning, NIH was about to double its budget over the 6-year period 1998-2003, providing tailwinds to help support the research funding of new faculty as well as existing faculty who were conducting both clinical and basic science research. Also, although the cost of construction and renovation seemed quite high at the time, in retrospect our half million sq. ft of new research space was very cheap, roughly half of what it would cost today.
Despite a sea of new space and a favorable funding environment at NIH, however, there was a lag in faculty recruitment as reorganization occurred under the new strategy. New investigators joined the medical school faculty, but only at a rate that just about offset departures and retirements. As can be seen in Figure 2, at the time I was appointed Dean by Dr. Stein in 2002, the size of the basic science faculty had not increased since the start of the Strategic Plan. Jay took me on a tour of the Kornberg Building, which was about 2/3 full, and of MRBX, which was 2/3 empty. "Your job," he said, "is to fill up this space with funded investigators!"
For the next several years, I had the pleasure of doing just that. Working with Chairs and Center Directors, we recruited faculty at a rate that exceeded the national average (AAMC data), as shown in Figure 2. Over the past decade, we have increased the number of basic science faculty by 60%. (Actually, the increase in scientists has been greater, but using AAMC definitions, the data shown in Figure 2 don't include MD or PhD investigators in clinical departments.) These faculty members not only populated the new Centers in our new space, but also represented key additions to both basic science and clinical departments, working in our "vintage" or renovated medical school space. True interdisciplinary teams developed and were successful in securing research funding for cross-cutting research.
Figure 2.
Our investments in basic-science research under the 1996 Strategic Plan were complimented by organic growth in clinical research by existing faculty. Both categories of research grew at approximately the same rate, resulting in the increased levels of total NIH funding to SMD shown in Figure 1. Although funding rose substantially in the decade between 1997 and 2006, our ambitious peers were also investing in research and grew at the same rate, leaving our NIH ranking essentially unchanged. (Effecting a plateau in NIH ranking may seem disappointing given the magnitude of our investment in research, but actually this was quite an achievement; had we not done this, we were on track to fall much lower in the rankings, as can be extrapolated in Figure 1.) Finally, however, the cumulative impact of the recruitment of superb faculty has become evident, with a significant movement upwards during 2007 in both NIH funding levels and medical school ranking.
There was no one driver of this result. The CTSA (Dean's Newsletters Aug. 4, 2006 and March 20, 2007) and the New York Influenza Center of Excellence (April 11, 2007 newsletter) clearly had something to do with last year's increase in NIH funding, but improvement was seen across the board. During a year when the number of new R01s awarded to medical schools by NIH declined from 2477 to 2065, new R01s to SMD faculty increased from 35 to 37. Even more striking, this was up from 24 new R01s in 2005. Also impressive was the increase in non-R01, R-series awards, which increased from 22 to 32 in 2007. These were mainly R21s, which are grants that support novel science. As a result of increases in such awards over the past few years, as well as large grants such as chemoprotection against radiation hazard (P.I., Paul Okunieff, MD, PhD), human immunology (P.I., Inaki Sanz, MD) and computer modeling of immune response (P.I., Hulin Wu, PhD), our non-competing renewals increased substantially in number and dollar amounts. Altogether, total NIH funding increased by $17 million, as shown in Figure 1.
Where do we go from here? It is hard to be optimistic about the future of NIH funding nationally over the next few years, but as a medical school we must take a longer-run view. Our hard work over the past decade has earned the School of Medicine and Dentistry a position of national leadership in clinical and translational science, and in biomedical research generally. We have established prominence in a number of scientific areas; critical mass and momentum are now with us. Consequently, investigators across the country now recognize the strength of our scientific environment and wish to join in. New scientific initiatives, as part of the URMC Strategic Plan led by Medical Center CEO Brad Berk, MD, PhD, are about to unfold. These new investments--in Innovative Scientific Programs including Imaging and Biomarkers, Nanomedicine, Stem Cell Biology, and Genomics and Systems Biology; and in Integrated Disease Programs including Cancer, Cardiovascular Disease, Immunology and Infectious Disease, Musculoskeletal Disease and Neuromedicine—will leverage our scientific progress by the recruitment of new faculty and the infusion of new ideas. All of these efforts, I think you will agree, are effectively advancing our core mission of using education, science and technology to promote health.
Meliora,
David S. Guzick, MD, PhD
Dean, School of Medicine and Dentistry
