A double-digit drop in National Institutes of Health funding to Cleveland’s top medical research institutions has researchers worried, according to The Plain Dealer.
Grant dollars from the premier funding agency for federal research had dropped about 17 percent to $232 million by 2008 from $280 million in 2005, according to a Plain Dealer analysis of National Institutes of Health (NIH) numbers.
More than 5,000 jobs at University Hospitals, Case Western Reserve University, MetroHealth System and the Cleveland Clinic are directly or indirectly tied to grant money, according to sources at these institutions, the Plain Dealer said.
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The news for the region may not be as bad as it sounds. The story reported that grants to small businesses had dropped by 50 percent. But, actually, those grants have held steady. In 2008, the region received almost $13.3 million in Small Business Innovation Research grants, which are considered NIH funding. Thousands of people likely work for small businesses that work with grant-funded researchers in the region.
While medical researchers in Northeast Ohio continue to get their share of the national funding pie, that pie has stopped growing. The funding drops come amid a leveling-off of NIH budgets in the last five years, a trend researchers hope President Barack Obama and his administration will reverse.
Already there is light at the end of the tunnel. In a summary of its American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the U.S. House Appropriations Committee said it wanted to give the NIH $2 billion more, mostly to study diseases like Parkinson’s, as well as $1.5 billion more to help renovate university biomedical research facilities so they can better compete for grants.
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