UCLA health research lab directors are finding that an increasing amount of their time is being taken away from the search for the next medical breakthrough in order to balance lab budgets.
Lab research and operations depend on federally funded research project grants, which are getting smaller and more competitive as the National Institutes of Health’s budget continues to thin out.
Over the span of two years, the amount of the institutes’ funding designated for research project grants fell by $389 million, according to budget documents.
In 2006, that meant $2,408,500 less for UCLA than in 2005.
“Funding has been tight and is getting tighter,” said Ezekiel Emanuel, chairman of the Department of Clinical Bioethics at the national institutes.
A recent spike in the number of grant applications has also created a general sense that the amount of money for each research grant is lower, Emanuel said.
The initial amount of money awarded to a lab can also change after the grant is awarded.
“At this point, even if you get them to fund you, they might cut (the grant),” said Chih-Ming Ho, director of the Institute of Cell Mimetic Space Exploration at UCLA.
This has left UCLA’s research administration and some lab directors looking more frequently at other financial resources ““ private ones, such as pharmaceutical companies and the tobacco industry, among others.
“We are actually engaged very much in trying to expand our relationship with industry,” said Roberto Peccei, vice chancellor of research.
But such trends have raised questions throughout the medical community about whether research projects are initiated more by academic or monetary interests.
An example of controversy over private funding came with the recent coverage of UCLA’s relationship with the tobacco industry.
A 2003 study at UCLA that found secondhand smoke did not cause lung cancer used funds from the tobacco industry to fund its research according to doctors like UC San Francisco professor of medicine Stanton Glantz, who have urged the University of California Board of Regents to stop such funding.
But some lab directors struggling to fund research operations wonder what other options they have.
What is ultimately not being discussed enough by the university administration is how health research labs will cope with more money disappearing from their budgets every year, said Dr. Arthur Toga, director of the Laboratory of Neuro Imaging at UCLA.
Difficulties funding health research
Toga, who has been studying the brain at UCLA for 20 years, said he loves his job and the approximately 100-person neurology lab he runs. The lab performs long-term studies on neurological ailments such as Alzheimer’s disease.
To pay for it all ““ his salary, his employees’ salaries, equipment, phone lines, internet access, maintenance and janitors to clean the bathrooms ““ Toga said he is completely dependent on the grants he wins because UCLA does not cover any of these costs.
UCLA also takes a portion of each of his grants.
The university receives 54 percent of the grant money awarded to any on-campus research effort, according to the Office of Contracts and Grants.
Out of a $1 million grant, for example, at least $540,000 goes immediately to the university.
The percentage is negotiated between the university and the federal government based on indirect costs such as facility construction, said Connie Whitley, contract and grant officer for the School of Medicine.
Toga’s main concern is not the money raised by the university through research ““ a common practice at many universities ““ but the additional costs UCLA has imposed on the labs’ already-depleted budgets this year, he said.
“Last year, the university just imposed a technology infrastructure fee that costs $49 a month per employee so their internet usage is paid for on campus, even though we were already paying for it,” Toga said.
The university also voted to increase the cost of living adjustment and give maintenance staff a raise, leaving it up to the research labs to pay for the salary increases, Toga said.
But Peccei said the university research administration is not oblivious to the financial concerns of lab directors on campus.
“We know there has been a slowdown in the money the government has put into research funding, but there are ways we try to help the faculty get funding,” Peccei said, such as encouraging industry sponsorship of research.
But Toga’s long-term neurology research relies more on federal NIH grants.
Combined with federal funding shortages that Toga describes as “the worst that it’s ever been by far,” these decreases mean steady staff layoffs for Toga’s lab.
If staff layoffs continue, Toga said he expects to see a downward spiral for the overall quality of research and of UCLA as an institution.
“(Lack of research funds) means a great amount of the time you spend as a scientist on campus is spent on time trying to generate money, which means you have less time to work on your actual research,” Toga said.
Without good research, the university cannot continue to attract as good of faculty or as smart of students, Toga said. He added that he believes this reduces opportunities for youth to find their place in the research field.
Using private contracts to fund labs
Though health research labs’ budgets are hard-hit by federal funding cuts all across the country, certain kinds of labs are suffering less than others ““ ones whose research can be funded by commercial interests.
“It’s been tough, I must say that, but we’ve survived very well because one of the strengths of our lab is that we can do services for clients and we can charge them,” said Dr. Navindra Seeram, assistant lab director for the Center for Human Nutrition, where food and certain medications are researched.
The majority of the lab’s funding is still federal, but its private contracts make up a major secondary source of funding, Seeram said.
A portion of these clients are patients who come into the center’s obesity clinic for help. But another portion of this revenue comes from private industry contracting with the lab to research something specific.
“There are private companies and pharmaceutical companies that contract us to do research for them ““ point being that there are people that come to us for a service and then we are paid,” Seeram said.
One of the nutrition lab’s biggest contractors is POM Wonderful, the brand that popularized pomegranate juice sold in a bubble-shaped bottle.
Before POM Wonderful could tout the health benefits of pomegranates, UCLA’s nutrition lab, along with other labs, had to prove these benefits through their own research, Seeram said.
Seeram said he believes the pomegranate health craze right now would not be what it is today without private funding from POM Wonderful backing it, because there was hardly any research done on pomegranates before.
But Seeram added that it was academic curiosity that motivated the university’s pomegranate research.
“We always have the choice of whether this is a subject we want to research or not,” Seeram said. “We are an academic institution first and foremost.”
He also said when a private source funds research, they do not have complete control over how those funds are used.
Grant money from the California Strawberry Commission, for example, is used to study a variety of berries, not just strawberries, Seeram said.
But for labs concentrating on long-term projects that do not attract private clients, the same revenue-gathering habits of the Center for Human Nutrition Lab are not as much of an option.
One such lab is part of the Institute for Cell Mimetic Space Exploration, where interdisciplinary research between the engineering and medical fields aims to discover the therapeutic potential of technology.
Chih-Ming Ho, director of the institute, said he hopes the lab can use sensor technology on cells to find a faster way of diagnosing several diseases.
“Privately funded research is more interested in seeing how it will affect things in the next six months. Our study is more concerned with long-term effects that will take place over the course of five to 10 years,” Ho said.
Because the laboratory’s research is operated on a long-term basis, Ho said he is unsure about how the initiative will continue being funded in the future.
“The cost of equipment is going up too, especially for interdisciplinary study, so researching in this area is a very costly process,” Ho said. “So we don’t know what’s going to happen in the next few years.”