Funding resuscitation research

Abstract

The present trend in managed care has meant downsizing expectations concerning the availability of support for resuscitation research. This trend applies to funding possibilities from industry, governmental agencies, and nongovernmental agencies (Table 1). There will be increasing barriers to making innovations. Truth, science, and good patient care alone will not make potential donors give grants. Investigators must also understand the potential donors' expectations and be persuasive. "Delight your donor". Industries' concerns include intellectual property rights and publications. The National Institutes of Health, recently favoring molecular biology over lifesaving therapies or integrated physiologic research, is an anomaly. The current peer review system propagates itself without having advocates for resuscitation research. This system has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The American Heart Association is only recently, after 30 yrs of educational activities concerning cardiopulmonary resuscitation, considering putting some basic research money into resuscitation research. In university hospitals, where clinical departments have made significant contributions to innovative, clinically relevant life-support research, funded with incomes from patient care, the sky is beginning to fall. Resuscitation researchers need persuasive advocates with clout and hard data to convince funding agencies to give support to multilevel research and development in areas of pathophysiology and reversibility of terminal states and clinical death--to give these topics a higher priority than is currently available.