Introduction: Obtaining National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding for scientific research has become increasingly difficult. With increasing clinical demands and declining NIH funding, performing research in addition to clinical duties is burdensome. We hypothesized that physician-scientists remain among the most productive researchers in abdominal organ transplantation.

Methods: Grants awarded by the NIH for the study of islet, pancreas, kidney, and liver transplantation were identified by using NIH Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tools Expenditures and Results (RePORTER), an online database that contains the following information for each grant active within the last 25 years: principal investigator, department, publications, and funding records. Five search terms for each organ including “islet transplantation”, “pancreas transplantation”, “liver transplantation”, and “kidney transplantation” were queried. Papers from each grant were assigned the impact factor (Journal of Citation Reports 2016) for the journal in which they were published. A “Grant Impact” score was calculated for each grant by the sum of manuscript impact factors divided by funding for that grant, and these were analyzed by department.

Results: A total of 471 grants representing $1.1 billion in funding were identified and these grants were associated with more than 6700 papers published. Physician-scientists (clinician-scientists) received 330 grants totaling $885 million, academic researchers (basic scientists) received 59 grants totaling $115 million, and private industry received 82 grants totaling $115 million. Physician-scientists (2.328) had significantly higher median Grant Impact compared to private industry (0; p < 0.0001) or to academic researchers (1.548; p = 0.044). Physician-scientists ($1.44 million) also receive significantly higher funding per grant compared to private industry ($705 thousand; p < 0.0001), but not compared to academic researchers ($1.33 million p = 0.110).

Conclusions: Physician-scientists have high Grant Impact compared to other researchers and receive 79% of funding in abdominal transplantation research. Even in an era of difficult NIH funding and increasing clinical demands, physician-scientists are a dual-threat in the study of organ transplantation and should continue to be prioritized for NIH funding based on high research productivity.

CITATION INFORMATION: Narahari A., Mehaffey J., Chandrabhatla A., Baderdinni P., Kron L., Brayman K. Analysis of NIH Research Funding in Transplantation: The Important Impact of Physician-Scientists in Abdominal Transplant Research Am J Transplant. 2017;17 (suppl 3).

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