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"The Good Old R01": Challenging Downward Funding Success Trends at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) remains the largest source of funding for biomedical research in the United States. However, the current tight fiscal climate is creating concerns related to the success in obtaining NIH funding. In this report, we focused on analyzing the trend of new and renewal competing R01 applications, as a measure of the most prevalent NIH funding mechanism that supports many US laboratories, and the new science being proposed in the field. We analyzed data on R01 applications submitted to the NIH, the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), the Division of Cardiovascular Sciences, and the Vascular Biology and Hypertension Branch for fiscal years 2010 through 2014. This comparative analysis at multiple levels allowed us to position the situation of cardiovascular research R01s, from within the big picture of NIH funding to looking at specific trends at the level of particular areas of investigation within Vascular Biology and Hypertension Branch. We found that the success rates of competing R01s decreased at all levels: NIH, NHLBI, Division of Cardiovascular Sciences, and Vascular Biology and Hypertension Branch. Interestingly, we found that competitive renewal R01 applications remained more successful (≈2×) than new R01 applications at all levels during this period. By identifying and analyzing some variances to the general trends, we found that some successes may be attributed to effectively using the specific R01 structure that supports team science (ie, Multiple Principal Investigator awards), which enables the active collaborations among investigators with different expertise to pursue together a novel scientific hypothesis. 

National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the largest funding source for biomedical research and development in the world1 and supports research projects, resources, facilities, and personnel costs via various funding mechanisms. NIH investments in extramural research contribute to the overall economy in many ways, through creation …