NIH urges investigators to finish research on time

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By Bill Snyder

March 26, 2010

Speed is of the essence.

That's the message from the National Institutes of Health to researchers around the country, including more than 150 at Vanderbilt University, who have received NIH stimulus grants under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

The grants will provide more than $76 million to Vanderbilt researchers over the next two years to purchase major new equipment, hire additional staff and make significant progress on a host of biomedical research projects.

But while researchers can take an extra year to complete their projects (without additional federal funds), any additional extensions will require prior NIH approval, and those requests will be considered only “in very limited circumstances,” the NIH said last week.

That's because “the primary goals of all NIH Recovery Act awards are to create U.S. jobs and increase the tempo of biomedical research,” the advisory said.

Determining the number of jobs created or retained due to NIH stimulus grants is easier said than done.

Instead of simply reporting the number of people involved in a study funded by a stimulus grant, researchers must figure out the percentage of time that each individual actually works on the study. Thus, if 10 people in a lab each spend 10 percent of their day engaged in Recovery Act-funded research, that's one full-time equivalent (FTE) position — not 10.

As of Jan. 31, 121 FTEs had been created or retained at Vanderbilt due to NIH stimulus grants. And while that does not sound like a huge return on a $76 million investment, those are only preliminary figures.

In addition, the equipment purchased, the labs expanded and the data generated, thanks to the two years of stimulus funding, will enable many of the researchers to compete successfully for future grants that they otherwise might not have been able to obtain.

This is what is meant by increasing the “tempo” of biomedical research.

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