NIH Limits on Grants to Investigators: First Step to Improve Distribution of Taxpayer Money

Earlier this month, NIH announced a new policy that would restrict the amount of grant money an individual investigator can hold at any one time. The policy is designed to encourage better distribution of grant money to newer and mid-career investigators. That’s a good first step to better distribute tax-payers money but there are other issues with the grant system that need work as well. NIH gives out about 45 different kinds of grants; R01 is the most popular, to fund anything from basic research to clinical trials, epidemiological studies and studies in large animals. And since all research does not cost same money, grants of the same category, vary in amount. Under the new policy, grant distribution will not be based solely on the monetary value of the grant but a combination approach called the Grant Support Index (GSI), which is based on the “PQRST” factor, namely “Performance, Quality, Reproducibility, Sharing, and Translation” of the research being funded. NIH plans to better define the GSI Index in the next few months based on discussions with the scientific community. A few things are already clear about this policy; an investigator will be limited to about 3 R01 grants or a combination of other types of grants totaling a GSI Index of 21. This policy will free up enough money to fund about 1600 new grants and will affect about 6% of the total grantees (or about 60% of the high-rollers currently getting NIH grants). The policy has broad appeal in the scientific community; the idea that was originally proposed more than 30 years ago, almost immediately got major groups behind it. This policy addresses a major complaint against the NIH grant process where a few investigators hogged the majority of the funding available with about 10% of grantees winning about 40% of the total research money available. Investigators may try to work around the grant limit by collaborating with new investigators but even in that case, the new investigators will have a higher value since the grant will be in their name. Some concerns have been raised about the PQRST approach; while it is relatively easy to measure productivity (eg.  via publications), quality and reproducibility (eg. via citations), it is practically impossible to design a rating for the “sharing” and “translation” factors. And those two factors are extremely important for encouraging innovation, which is the stated goal of the grants. It would be interesting to see how NIH comes up with a scale for these factors. Also, this policy seems to be tailored primarily towards academic research, not towards the industrial research which is also funded by FDA under the SBIR/STTR grant system. Under that system, NIH gives out grants worth about $525 million each year. A review of the distribution of grants under the non-academic programs will likely show a similar asymmetric distribution of grant money with some companies repeatedly getting large grants and new companies struggling to get their foot in the door. A policy similar to that proposed for academic investigators is needed. Lastly, there have been complaints of grants not being always tailored to topics “relevant to general public”. In an opinion published in the Wall Street Journal, examples of so-called frivolous use of grant money were raised. In this political environment, it’s important that NIH does ignore these issues. With greater public questions about appropriately using tax payer money to support innovation, NIH needs to address all concerns to have a holistic approach that meets its goal of supporting “all” investigators who seek its help.