The budget proposed by the federal government for the upcoming fiscal year could have widespread effects on medical research around the country.
The federal budget includes funding for the National Institutes of Health, which sponsors a significant amount of American behavioral and medical research.
Approximately 80 percent of the Penn School of Medicine's budget comes from the NIH.
The NIH budget has doubled in the last five years, and Penn has likewise seen a significant increase in funding.
The proposed federal budget, however, is only slated to increase the agency's resources by about 3 percent per year, compared to nearly 15 percent increases each year between 1998 and 2003. Last year, the agency awarded approximately $28 billion nationwide.
The Medical School is the second largest recipient of NIH money, and received $348 million in 2002.
Glen Gaulton, vice dean for research and research training for the Medical School, said that without a significant increase in funding, the school will have to allocate its funds more efficiently.
"The issue is less the actual money budgeted and more the actual allocation of that money to targeted research areas," Gaulton said.
The money will be allocated through a new NIH initiative called "NIH Roadmap."
The Roadmap will provide guidelines for universities to maximize the money received from the NIH. It concentrates on accelerating medical discovery and application of discoveries made in labs.
Group research, as opposed to individual investigator research, will be stressed under this program.
"Our budget is admittedly large," NIH spokesman Marc Stern said. "That money is only well spent if we can use it to advance our knowledge in many, many disease specialties."
However, Gaulton believes that the Medical School is "adapting to the Roadmap initiatives to respond in a manner equally efficient to the recent doubling of the NIH budget."
Even without continual increases in federal funding, Gaulton said that "we are very well-positioned to succeed."
Although he added that "making the Roadmap happen as it's laid out will be hard," he sees the change in the system "not as a negative, but as a challenge."
Investigators in the Medical School have reacted to the new system with a different attitude.
Researcher James Alwine acknowledged that the Roadmap is "a way to get basic research to the clinics," but also noted the potential problems that may arise from adopting this system.
The change from individual research to group research is a fundamental one. Prior to the Roadmap, individual investigators applied directly to the NIH for funding. Now, this will not likely be the case.
At Penn, research centers will apply for grants, and then distribute the funds to the individual researchers. There are 28 research centers in the Medical School, researching topics from aging to cancer.
The change will take some getting used to for investigators.
"Investigator-initiated research might be limited" by the changes made when the Roadmap is instituted, Alwine said. "Individual investigator discovery has been the backbone" of recent medical discoveries.
There is some "apprehension among basic scientists," he added.
