Translational Research in Colorado

The Colorado BioScience Association kicked off the first BioBreakfast of the year at the new Education 1 building on the Anschutz Medical Campus featuring University of Colorado's new Vice Chancellor for Research, Dr. Richard Traystman. Dr. Traystman together with Dr. Ronald Sokol of The Children's Hospital, presented CU's bid for a Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) grant.

The CTSA grant is part of the National Institutes of Health's Roadmap for Medical Research, a program spearheaded by NIH Director Dr. Elias Zerhouni in response to the rapidly depleting drug pipelines of the nation's pharmaceutical companies. The "T" in CTSA stands for Translational; the concept of bringing a drug from the laboratory bench to the patient's bedside. In other words: applying biomedical research to finding new therapies.

Now we all assume that biomedical research is a good thing and that it's where all of our new therapies will come from, but the reality is that even as the NIH's budget doubled from 1993 to 2004 the pharmaceutical pipelines were thinning. We found out that there is no correlation between spending on basic research and new treatments being brought to market.

The CTSA program represents one of the ways the NIH is seeking to address this issue by becoming more proactive in generating therapeutic results instead of journal articles. The General Clinical Research Center grants are being phased out in favor of the new program, compelling current GCRC recipients, such as CU, to retool and apply for the new program.

Final decisions on the application will be received in May. We’ll keep our fingers crossed.

Flat NIH Budget

A front page article in today's Denver Post Scientists fight for research funding describes the situation at research labs dependent upon National Institutes of Health grants to fund basic research. How this made it onto the front page is baffling to me since the story is a couple years old (see Fewer Grants Force Younger Scientists to Leave Academia, WSJ, July 27, 2004). Although research capacity has been growing rapidly over the past few years, the NIH budget has been flat since 2004 creating greater competition for NIH grants.

Dr. Elias A. Zerhouni, director of the National Institutes of Health, explained the situation last September and has offered strategies. Funding of basic research has actually increased by 2% in the overall NIH budget since 1998 (54% to 56%) and applied research has increased by 1% (40% to 41%) with infrastructure decreasing by 3% (6% to 3%).

With growth stagnant in the overall NIH budget, funding of new projects and new scientists will decrease just at a time when many scientists in training through the high growth years are coming on-line. If, as the Post article suggests, there is sufficient need in the private sector, young scientists will migrate over. However, given the rigid requirements of an academic career, it is doubtful that they will return when funding levels resume.