July 9, 2005

MUSC snares $180 million in Grants

Jonathan Maze  /  Post and Courier

The Medical University of South Carolina took in $180 million in research grants last year, a record that reflects the growing role of medical studies at the institution.

Continuing that growth could be tough, university officials said, because federal research funding has stagnated and competition for grants has grown more fierce. Dr. John Raymond, MUSC's provost, said there's already evidence of that happening. Five years ago, 25 percent of university applications for grants were funded on the first request. That number is now down to less than 13 percent. If it gets much lower and into the single digits. Raymond said, "it will be difficult, if not impossible, to sustain growth, even at the best institutions."

Nevertheless, the $180 million the university received in the fiscal year that ended June 30 is another record for a South Carolina institution, beating MUSC's record last year by $5 million. The funds include hundreds of grants awarded to researchers. Some of the biggest include $2.3 million in federal money to research health disparities in blacks and a $2.8 million award in October from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to reduce cancer caused by smoking. The university received a $2.7 million award in April for computer-aided cancer management.

Grants given to MUSC researchers have grown every year since 1996. Research dollars have tripled over that period, and in 1998-99 MUSC became the first institution in the state to break the $100 million mark. MUSC ranked 71st in the country in National Institutes of Health awards in 2004, with $83.5 million, behind the University of Kentucky and just ahead of the University of Texas at Houston. The university ranked 67th in 2003.

Research has grown over the years, it still has a long way to go to catch up to No. 1 Johns Hopkins, which last year netted nearly $600 million in research dollars, more than three times MUSC's entire research budget. Raymond has been warning for years that growth in research undertaken by the institution could not be sustained long.

Federal dollars account for three-quarters of the research done at MUSC. Beginning in the 1990s, Congress poured money into the National Institutes of Health. Consequently, the amount of research grants the agency awarded doubled between 1998 and 2004, when it awarded $22.9 billion. Between 1999 and 2003, annual growth in the amount of grants awarded by the agency grew between 13 and 15 percent every year. But some of the agency's sheen has worn off in Congress, and with concerns mounting about budget deficits, NIH funding has fallen. Research grants awarded by the agency grew just 4.7 percent last year.

Dr. Jack Feussner, chairman of the Department of Medicine at the university's medical school, said the budget proposal making its way through the U.S. House of Representatives calls for a 1 percent increase in NIH funding, which he likened to a cut because it doesn't keep up with inflation. The result: Boosting research will more difficult because the grants will be more competitive.

Raymond himself is on an NIH committee that reviews proposals for neuroscience research projects. That group recently reviewed grants proposed by two former Nobel Prize winners, and although both projects were viewed positively, neither was funded. Feussner said that while Congress was pumping money into research, smaller institutions like MUSC benefited the most because there was more money to go around. Now these institutions will have to work harder to compete for funds because they don't have big endowments to carry them through difficult times and they don't have the infrastructure of research-heavy schools such as Johns Hopkins, Harvard and Duke.

"It's going to be tough," Feussner said. "But we're not depressed or defeatist in any way. We're going to work hard to get at least our fair share of these funds." Feussner added that South Carolina's Research Centers of Excellence program, which pumps lottery funds into universities to boost research, gives the state's institutions a competitive edge. But Raymond said that program is "unlikely to help us in the short term."

So for this fiscal year, Raymond isn't predicting big growth, and he said the university would be doing well to see research increased by the same amount as last year. "Modest growth would be a significant accomplishment," Raymond said.