(T1230-02-06) Fostering Innovation and Expanding Institutional Research from Bench to Bedside

Purpose: Life science discoveries requires systemic enablers to overcome translational barriers and accelerate integration of research findings into clinical practice. This study was designed to identify effective organizational strategies and incentives to expand research and advance discoveries from bench to bedside.

Methods: From the NIH RePORTER and RePORT, data about 93,703 contact Principal Investigators were extracted to analyze 254 US research universities and institutions between 2012 and 2021. The sample was ranked based on percentage growth of NIH funding over 10 years and subsequently split into an upper half of fast growers and lower half of controls. The primary ranking variable was the percent growth of institutional NIH funding over the ten years interval. The data analysis compared the fast growing organizations with controls.

Results: We found that the fast growers had significantly larger talent pool of PIs than controls (median size 276 vs. 239, p < 0.001), more continuously active PIs (56 vs. 43, p < 0.001), more recruited PIs (35 vs. 25 ,p < 0.001) and more internally raised PIs (136 vs. 110, p < 0.001).In the talent pool of fast growers versus controls, the chances of regaining funding were also significantly better (P= 0.000014).

Conclusion: The centerpiece of most productive growth strategies is “support your own people” by helping past successful researchers to regain funding as PIs, increasing project size per PI, and internally raising principal investigators who were unfunded but become newly funded. Recruitment of funded PIs appears to be less influential.

References: 1. Cozzoli N, Salvatore FP, Faccilongo N, Milone M. How can big data analytics be used for healthcare organization management? Literary framework and future research from a systematic review. BMC health services research. 2022;22(1):809.
2. Rahman MM, Ghoshal UC, Ragunath K, Jenkins G, Rahman M, Edwards C, et al. Biomedical research in developing countries: Opportunities, methods, and challenges. Indian Journal of Gastroenterology. 2020;39:292-302.
3. Isoko, K., Cordiner, J. L., Kis, Z., & Moghadam, P. Z. (2024). Bioprocessing 4.0: a pragmatic review and future perspectives. Digital Discovery, 3(9), 1662-1681.
4. Pan, S. Y., Pan, S., Yu, Z. L., Ma, D. L., Chen, S. B., Fong, W. F. & Ko, K. M. (2010). New perspectives on innovative drug discovery: an overview. Journal of pharmacy and pharmaceutical sciences, 13(3), 450-471.

Acknowledgements: The authors recognize funding support from the US National Institutes of Health (R01 GM146338-01).


Table 1. Performance comparison of fast grower and control research organizations based on NIH supported research at the end of the 2011-2020 period.


Figure 1: Comparison between fast growers (Red) and control group (Blue) based on the amount of NIH funding (2012-2021)


Figure 2: Comparison between the performance of fast growers (Red) and control research organizations (Blue) based on six actionable measures and the resulting NIH funding increases (2012- 2021)