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February 17, 2000

Med school breaks into top 10 of NIH funding

There was good news for the University's medical research community in the Jan. 27 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).

An article in the NEJM shows that Pitt's School of Medicine and Case Western Reserve University's medical school were the only two academic medical centers in the country to break into the top 10 list of universities receiving funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) during the decade between 1986 and 1997.

The article stated that this shifting in rank was rare and concluded that "schools that are highly active in research can be reasonably sure that their institutions will probably continue to lead in research and benefit from increases in NIH funding."

This study, conducted by the Association of American Medical Colleges, Washington, DC; the Institute for Science and Health Policy, University of Florida, Gainesville, and the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, Chapel Hill, reviewed how the distribution of NIH research awards to medical schools changed between 1986 and 1997. NIH is the main source of research support for medical schools in the United States.

The results of the study indicate that during that time period, the proportion of research awards granted by NIH to the 10 most research-intensive medical schools increased from 24.6 percent to 27.1 percent. The increase in proportion of awards to the top 10 of the 125 U.S. medical schools consisted primarily of increases in awards to clinical departments; awards to individual academic physicians and scientists; and competitive awards from member institutes, such as the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the National Cancer Institute.

Among the conclusions drawn from the study is that chances are great research funding will increase once an academic medical center cracks the top 10 in federal research funding.

"The University of Pitts-burgh's emergence as one of the country's most important medical research centers during the past decade did not occur by accident," said Arthur Levine, senior vice chancellor for Health Sciences and School of Medicine dean. "With the support of UPMC Health System, the University and the community, there was a deliberate, concerted effort to invest in building an infrastructure that would foster the rapid growth of medical research. This was coupled with active recruitment of some of the world's leading biomedical scientists. This investment in people and resources has yielded a current portfolio of federal research grants approaching $200 million," he said.

As listed in the NEJM article, the top 10 research-intensive medical schools in the United States in 1997 were: Johns Hopkins; the University of California, San Francisco; Yale; Penn; Washington University; the University of Washington; the University of Michigan; Duke; Case Western Reserve, and Pitt.


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