I hope everybody found our recent Town Hall to be informative and useful. I know that I find it very valuable for all of us to get together for these types of updates. And you can be assured that we will continue to have these Town Halls as long as people are interested to hear what we have to say.
Everyone heard a lot about what’s happening at the Town Hall meeting, so I don’t have a lot of new information to share with you.
I did have a nice meeting with the Gala chairs last Monday as we start planning for next year’s Gala. While the event planning is obviously at its earliest stages, we are committed to bring it back – freshly updated – and continuing to be the premier celebration of the accomplishments and mission of Lombardi.
Below you will find a guest post from Maria Laura Avantaggiati, which is in part a response to one of my recent posts. Have a great week.
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I am personally pleased that Obama won this election, and several editorials on Nature have outlined his positions on novel initiatives that he plans to undertake. One of them includes the reinstatement of the appointment of a science advisor who reports directly to the President, and apparently Dr. Varmus has been playing a somewhat equivalent role during his presidential campaign. Therefore, we can anticipate that his choices for this position, as well as for the NIH and NCI directors, will be in a category of people who are in touch with the scientific community.
On the other hand, Obama’s proposals and projections to redouble NIH funding will have to deal with the challenges of this economy of the next two years. I am also certain that within the budget for science, the first priority will be on development of alternative energy. Thus, we may not see a real impact on grant success rates for quite awhile.
There are additional concerns that I would like to share, and that are independent of the NIH budget. While I do not entirely disagree with all the changes that the Zherouni’ administration has introduced in the NIH grant programs, there will be negative tails from his policy. Zherouni and Scarpa have reshaped the grant review process, and starting next year the size of RO1s will be similar to that of R21s. It can be anticipated that this will favor large laboratories with a higher track record of publications. While a few years back we could get an RO1 on great ideas and work that was not yet published, this will be highly unlikely, if not impossible, in the years to come.
This is worrisome, especially when we think about the explosion of resources and technology that comes from the biotech companies. Certain companies such as Origene, Genescript and others have expression vectors-, antibodies- and siRNA- ready for thousands of the human and mouse ORFs. At the cost of 30K (not so unreasonable after all!) Taconics offers transgenic or knockout mice strains for 20,000+ genes, many of which have not been published yet, and for which preliminary information about the phenotype (whether embryonic lethal or not), is already known.
Today, if we are working on a new gene and have thousands of dollars to spend, in a few weeks we could have cDNAs, antibodies, siRNAs and a mouse model that could make our science really competitive in time. And time is at the essence of our work. This again will give an advantage to large laboratories. Without the thousands, we are back to the standard, old fashion, time consuming, laboratory techniques.
When we look at papers that are published on high impact journals, and RO1 grants the get funded in study sections, it is really the techniques and the resources that the laboratories employ that make the difference. The difference is between being able to ask questions at a mechanistic level, or simply describe a phenomenon.
So, how can we remain competitive, and keep up with the fast pace at which science is moving in a period of financial constraints? Obviously there is no easy solution, One of the initiatives that I thought about, and I discussed individually with some of our collegues, is to programmatically (and Departmentally) invest money in purchasing key, cutting edge reagents that could serve the purpose of advancing projects with potential for PO1s applications, which could act as research catalysts for multiple investigators. We could programmatically invest in salary support for key personnel as well, such as one technician or one post-doctoral fellow who could work on the development of such projects. This could be done in a competitive fashion, with intra-departmental grant applications. Similarly to what is being done with IRG grants, except with a more sizeable budget, and by keeping applications within the Lombardi Cancer Center.
May be it is a surrealistic proposal. Is this something that Dr. Weiner and other colleagues would find reasonable and feasible?
3 replies on “A guest post from Maria Laura Avantaggiati”
I would like to take some of Maria’s insightful remarks a step further.
In regard to Shared Resources, we should hold a forum where faculty can offer sugestions about the types of upgrades that are needed for our research, and how they could foster collaboration. It would be worthwhile to hold a forum on this topic to arrive at a consensus.
A related if not more important topic is to hold a research forum where faculty can interact and offer suggestions on common ground for collaborative research that would collectively address new programmatic research initiatives rather than R01’s. Carol Herod could help in identifiying suitable RFP’s and research programs. The Wed. seminars have helped to some extent, but they are not integrated and are too spread out to be of much value. One idea to facilitate such an approach would be for the CCSG program leaders to identify common ground among members of ALL program in order to rehsape them into more cohesive programs, as suggested at the retreat nearly 6 months ago. This could be vetted with the faculty at a special research forum.
Bob Glazer has raised some interesting points. I don’t like to have too many “retreats”, because everyone is busy, and we all have enough meetings to attend. However, his ideas about identifying needs for our Shared Resources will be a topic at the next Faculty Sector Meeting, and should be an interesting starting point for further discussions.
His Research Forum idea is interesting but I think is perhaps a bit too critical of our existing venues for fostering collaborations. I think the Wednesday seminars have been terrific opportunities for all of us to learn more about the work being done at Lombardi. I don’t want them to be “integrated”; I want them to be platforms for our researchers to present their ideas. We are trying to use the Program Leader and Associate Director meetings as sounding boards when we learn about new RFAs, RFPs, etc., that involve collaborative research; we will try to do more in that regard, perhaps through a formalized mechanism.
The refashioning of Programs to assure that they reflect and promote intra-programmatic collaborations is an area of intense activity; this began after the Retreat, and I am very pleased with the subtle but important realignments that are evolving. You’ll be hearing much more about this in the next few weeks. I believe these changes will be viewed very positively.
I think that strengthening and/or expanding the shared resources “strategically” is an absolutely key point, as it is to identify areas for collaborations and promote them. Personally, I believe that all the changes to the RO1 system introduced recently by NIH suggest that these grants are eventually destined to succumb. Or at least they will not play the same role that they used to play years ago, in supporting our research. NIH is clearly moving towards opening new funding for inter-multi-disciplinary approaches, multiple investigators and collaborative grants. Therefore, perhaps this is the direction where we all should be moving, start thinking and invest the most.