A survey indicates that research is active and diverse at U.S. academic medical centers and that a substantial proportion of faculty conduct research and publish without sponsorship, according to a study in the September 2 issue of JAMA.
"Encompassing 60 percent of all research money to universities, the academic, life-science research enterprise is large and growing, representing $28.8 billion in research and development expenditures in 2006," the authors write as background information in the article. "To establish policies and priorities, a better empirical picture is needed of what the academic medical center (AMC) research enterprise looks like, but beyond generic classifications such as 'basic' and 'applied,' these data do not exist."
Darren E. Zinner, Ph.D., of Brandeis University, Waltham, Mass., and Eric G. Campbell, Ph.D., of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, conducted a study to quantitatively document the state of academic research in AMCs through a survey of research faculty. The survey, conducted in 2007, was mailed to 3,080 life-science faculty at the 50 universities with medical schools that received the most funding from the National Institutes of Health in 2004. The overall response rate was 74 percent, with questions on the survey regarding the type of research (basic, translational, clinical trials, health services research/clinical epidemiology, multimode, other), total funding, industry funding, publications, professional activities, patenting behavior and industry relationships.
Survey results indicated that one-third (33.6 percent) of AMC faculty members exclusively conducted basic science research as principal investigators, compared with translational researchers (9.1 percent), clinical trial investigators (7.1 percent), and health services research/clinical epidemiologists (9.0 percent). Those who solely conducted other clinical research represented 11.6 percent of research staff and were generally less focused on research.
"While principal investigators garnered a mean of $410,755 in total annual research funding, 22.1 percent of all AMC research faculty were unsponsored, a proportion that ranged from 11.5 percent for basic science researchers to 46.8 percent for health services researchers. The average AMC faculty member received $33,417 in industry-sponsored funding, with most of this money concentrated among clinical trial ($110,869) and multimode ($59,916) principal investigators. Translational (61.3 percent), clinical trial (67.3 percent), and multimode (70.9 percent) researchers were significantly more likely than basic science researchers (41.9 percent) to report a relationship with industry and that these relationships contributed to their most important scientific work," the authors write.