"Creating the Office of Clinical Research put us ahead of the curve on this," he explains. "There are very few academic health centers in the country that can be credited with that kind of foresight. The AHC was visionary in predicting how the field had to move and where the NIH was going."
The CTSA program is the product of two interdependent causes. One is strategic: A recent NIH study concluded that the advancement of clinical medical research has been neglected. The study's authors suggested that a grant program would help institutions create a home for clinical research and its principal investigators.
The other cause is economic: The NIH is facing a slight decline in its federal appropriation this year and will continue to do so well into the future. Coupled with inflation, that decline will mean a growing shortfall between research needs and federal money available to fund those needs.
"The NIH budget has undergone a 0.03 percent decrease in funding this year in real dollars," points out Charles Moldow, M.D., the Medical School's associate dean of research. And things aren't going to get better any time soon, he says. As part of the dwindling discretionary portion of the federal budget, the NIH will continue to face constraints in the years to come.
For institutions like the University of Minnesota, the implications are critical. Of America's 125 medical schools, about 80 currently receive NIH funding for General Clinical Research Centers, also known as GCRCs. (The University houses one such center.) Under the new NIH approach, all GCRCs are being phased out. Other NIH grants like the one known as K12 — which the University is using to underwrite 22 clinical research scholars — will be folded into the CTSA program. If 60 CTSA grants are awarded in 2012, that will leave at least 20 U.S. medical schools that now receive NIH funding on the outside looking in.
"Some of the country's 125 medical schools aren't eligible for NIH research money anyway because their primary mission is teaching, not research," Moldow observes. "But many that are eligible won't receive grants. There will definitely be winners and losers."
Which makes the University's rapid response to the NIH's new clinical research initiatives even more critical.
"This is not a tweaking," says Ahluwalia. "This is a major change. The creation of the Office of Clinical Research is just a beginning. We're fostering a comprehensive approach toward clinical and translational research that reaches across the Academic Health Center's six schools and colleges."