National Institutes of Health funding in radiation oncology: a snapshot

Abstract

Currently, pay lines for National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants are at a historical low. In this climate of fierce competition, knowledge about the funding situation in a small field like radiation oncology becomes very important for career planning and recruitment of faculty. Unfortunately, these data cannot be easily extracted from the NIH's database because it does not discriminate between radiology and radiation oncology departments. At the start of fiscal year 2013 we extracted records for 952 individual grants, which were active at the time of analysis from the NIH database. Proposals originating from radiation oncology departments were identified manually. Descriptive statistics were generated using the JMP statistical software package. Our analysis identified 197 grants in radiation oncology. These proposals came from 134 individual investigators in 43 academic institutions. The majority of the grants (118) were awarded to principal investigators at the full professor level, and 122 principal investigators held a PhD degree. In 79% of the grants, the research topic fell into the field of biology, 13% in the field of medical physics. Only 7.6% of the proposals were clinical investigations. Our data suggest that the field of radiation oncology is underfunded by the NIH and that the current level of support does not match the relevance of radiation oncology for cancer patients or the potential of its academic work force.

Figure 1

(A) Ranking of U.S. Radiation Oncology centers based on total active funding from the NIH at the beginning of fiscal year 2013. (B) Number of NIH awards and number of PIs per institution at the beginning of fiscal year 2013

Figure 1

(A) Ranking of U.S. Radiation Oncology centers based on total active funding from the NIH at the beginning of fiscal year 2013. (B) Number of NIH awards and number of PIs per institution at the beginning of fiscal year 2013

Figure 2

Distribution of PIs in Radiation Research with 1 to 5 NIH awards. A) A total of 134 individual investigators were awarded 197 grants, resulting in an average of 1.47 awards per investigator (1 award: n=90 (67.2%); 2 awards: n=30 (22.4%); 3 awards: n=10 (7.5%); 4 awards: n=3 (2.2%); 5 awards: n=1 (0.7%)) (B) Distribution of the current funding year for all active awards at the beginning of fiscal year 2013. 141 (71.6%) of all awards were in year 1–5 of their funding cycle.

Figure 3

Distribution of all awards between the different award mechanisms (A) and total annual costs (B). More than two thirds (76.9%) of the NIH support granted for radiation research was awarded under the P01, R01, R21, and U19 mechanisms.

Figure 4

Distribution of all Awards In Radiation by NIH Institution

Figure 5

Average total annual costs of grants awarded to Radiation Research at the beginning of fiscal year 2013 by award mechanism.