Abstract
The overall budget for the NCI has increased by about $1 billion since 2009, yet the payline for new R01 grants has continued to decrease, largely due to an influx of R01 grant applications. Researchers, troubled by this trend, are wondering why the NCI is receiving so many more applications and what can be done to improve the funding situation.
Since 2009, the NCI's budget has increased by about $1 billion, or 20%, yet the payline for new R01 grants has decreased from the 16th percentile to the 8th percentile, largely due to an increase of more than 60% in the number of applications. For investigators, this R01-funding trend has sparked concerns about the future of cancer research.
The jump in applications to the NCI is by far the largest among the NIH institutes. “I would argue it's a sign of the vibrancy of our cancer research field,” says NCI Director Norman “Ned” Sharpless, MD, who became acting director of the FDA in April. He adds, however, that the influx of applications does make funding requests more competitive.
Eileen White, PhD, deputy director of the Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey in New Brunswick, shares Sharpless's concern. “When you have a payline at the 8th percentile, you have to spend a huge amount of timepreparing and submitting grant applications, and I think it's really taken its toll on the scientific community—I just don't see this as a healthy environment for cancer research,” she says.
One problem, notes White, is that the peer-review system cannot reliably distinguish among those in the lowest percentiles, which introduces an element of luck into the application process. For example, one paper found that for 102,740 grants scored at or below the 20th percentile, scores did not predict productivity (eLife 2016;5:e13323).
Benjamin Neel, MD, PhD, director of the Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Cancer Center at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York, NY, agrees that limitations of the peer-review system are one possible reason for the increase in grant applications to the NCI. “You have people whose strategy is to just throw in as many grants as they can hoping to hit one,” he says. White adds that other causes could be greater interest in cancer research and the possible need to repeatedly resubmit an application.
Regardless, Neel thinks that increasing paylines—to the 15th or 20th percentile for R01 grants—should be a priority for the NCI. “Investigator-initiated peer-reviewed research is the lifeblood of the American scientific apparatus, and we risk destroying the ‘goose that laid the golden egg’ of science in this country if we don't fix this problem,” he says.
NCI funding challenges extend beyond paylines, says Ruth Keri, PhD, associate director for basic research at the Case Comprehensive Cancer Center in Cleveland, OH. She notes that newly funded R01s with a detailed, itemized budget are being cut by 19% in fiscal year (FY) 2019, up from 17% in FY 2018. R01s without a detailed budget are capped at $250,000, a sum that hasn't increased in more than 20 years despite inflation. According to Sharpless, these cuts—as well as cuts of 3% to noncompeting awards and 5% to NCI divisions, offices, and centers—have been implemented to maintain paylines.
To increase funding success, grant applications should undergo a full prereview at the applicant's institution before submission, Keri says. She also encourages researchers to apply to other NIH institutes that fund cancer research, such as the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.
“We are at a really amazing time in the history of cancer research, with immunotherapy, with targeted therapies, with the amount of technology that can be brought to bear on cancer questions, but to continue this engine, we need to diversify our portfolio and not just stick with NCI,” Keri says. –Catherine Caruso
For more news on cancer research, visit Cancer Discovery online at http://cancerdiscovery.aacrjournals.org/CDNews.
RSS Feeds