The University of Minnesota lost a federal grant for an institute that helps bring medical advances from the laboratory into clinical practice. U officials hope they will get funding restored next year, but acknowledge that the interruption will lead to some belt-tightening in 2017.
The university first landed the $51 million, five-year National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant in 2011. It used that money to develop its Clinical and Translational Science Institute, which provides support and training to researchers involved in health care and medical research.
The grant is the largest the U has ever received from the NIH. But officials at the university's Academic Health Center were notified recently that their proposal to secure a renewal of the grant fell short.
NIH reviewers faulted the proposal for a "lack of an overarching vision," a lack of diversity in training programs and slow approval times for human subject research.
On the positive side, the reviewers praised the quality of the institute's leadership along with "an impressive clinical research infrastructure."
"We've done an amazing job of building this enterprise. We started with nothing," said Tucker LeBien, associate vice president for research at the Academic Health Center.
"We are going to fix the problems that these reviewers have identified, and we are going to get renewed," he said.
Because the NIH approves only about one out of every five grant applications it receives, LeBien said, the university developed contingency plans in case the grant didn't get renewed on the first attempt.
