The ten-year period of erosion that followed the doubling of the NIH budget has hit some research institutions harder than others.
NIH appropriations figures provide a glimpse of the state of science funding in the U.S., but they don’t shed light on how individual institutions and areas of research are affected.
To conduct an exploratory analysis of levels of funding at specific institutions, The Cancer Letter compiled NIH and NCI funding figures from 2003 to 2013 for eight freestanding cancer centers and nine other research institutions that include cancer centers. A focus on freestanding cancer centers provides a snapshot of funding at institutions engaged primarily in basic and clinical cancer research.
The other academic institutions that include cancer centers were chosen to illustrate NIH and NCI funding levels at institutions that focus on a broader range of research.
Relying on the NIH Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tools database, The Cancer Letter charted the impact of twin calamities that struck biomedical research: the end of the doubling of the NIH budget, which concluded in 2003, and the expiration of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2010.
A third misfortune—ongoing biomedical inflation, charted by the Biomedical Research and Development Price Index, or BRDPI—further reduced purchasing power by about 25 percent over a decade. These two graphs illustrate what NCI and NIH funding would be had their budgets kept pace with rising inflation.
The Cancer Letter looked at three data sets for each institution:
- NIH funding since 2003,
- NCI funding since 2003, and
- ARRA funding in 2009 and 2010.
The eight freestanding cancer centers are: MD Anderson Cancer Center, Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, Fox Chase Cancer Center, Roswell Park Cancer Center, H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center, and City of Hope Cancer Center.
The Cancer Letter also focused on the following academic cancer centers that are components of larger institutions: Duke University, Stanford University, Johns Hopkins University, University of Pittsburgh, the Mayo Clinic, UT Southwestern, Ohio State University, the University of Southern California, and Baylor College of Medicine.
The data presented here are not adjusted for biomedical inflation.
Whether they are described as freestanding or as components of universities, many of these institutions are, in fact, consortia. Thus, “freestanding,” a classification that has been around for decades, doesn’t always constitute a meaningful category. Also, the manner in which data are submitted to the NIH Reporter may vary by institution and may not include other forms of funding, such as sub-contract arrangements.
With these caveats in mind, The Cancer Letter asked leaders of cancer centers, professional societies, and science advocacy organizations to comment on the data.
In this era of constricted funding, when the direct financial rewards of having an NCI designation have been declining, many institutions are nonetheless pursuing this mark of distinction, which gives them an advantage in fundraising, competition for healthcare dollars, and recruitment of researchers—particularly those who come with funded grants.
In an effort to distribute its funds more equitably, NCI has been redesigning the manner in which it sets the size of core grants, to eliminate the advantages of longevity in the centers program (The Cancer Letter, July 7, 2013; March 14, 2014; July 11, 2014).
The stakes are especially high because academic cancer centers are emerging as a conduit for adoption of precision medicine in oncology. A guest editorial on academic difference by George Weiner, director of the University of Iowa Holden Comprehensive Cancer Center and president of the Association of American Cancer Institutes, appears here.
The graphs summarizing the state of NIH and NCI funding at selected institutions appear below. Corresponding tables can be found on The Cancer Letter website.
