Flat funding for NIH could impact local biotech industry

The Washington area’s biotech industry is bracing for another hit as federal funding for the National Institutes of Health, one of the region’s largest providers of research and development money, remains flat for another year.

In the
Washington
region, where the biotech industry is still finding its footing, a slow down in funding could hurt the local economy, said Sally Sternbach, director of Rockville Economic Development Inc. Maryland’s I-270 corridor, and Rockville in particular, is heavily dependent on NIH funding to jump-start economic activity. For example, many of the area’s biotech start up firms were founded by researchers who were awarded NIH grant money.

The slow down in funding “has a profound affect. … It has a big impact because most of the NIH labs are here in Maryland ,” Sternbach said. “There are winners and losers in that environment, and that means there are diseases that are winners and losers and that’s tough.”

In 2000, NIH pumped $950 million into the Washington region’s biotech industry. But that number hasn’t increased by much over the years and competition for those funds has become increasingly heated.

“For individual scientists, their chances of success of winning a grant have dropped from one in three to one in less than five,” said Kei Koizumi, director of the research and development budget and policy program at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “Obviously there’s a lot more stress and anxiety around the scientific community.”

However, the NIH’s budget doubled between 1998 and 2003 and proponents of the slow down say the budget has simply leveled off to catch up with that rapid increase.

Either way, “it means much tougher competition to win NIH research grants,” Koizumi said. “NIH is so big. It really dominates the biomedical research field. It is hard to replace.”

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