'Omics Projects Snag More than $625M Worth of NIH Stimulus Grants

The National Institutes of Health has awarded 970 stimulus grants worth more than $625 million — around 14 percent of total NIH stimulus grant funding to date — to projects that fall within the broad family of 'omics disciplines, according to a preliminary analysis of the NIH funding database conducted by GenomeWeb Daily News.

As of Sept. 30, the close of the fiscal year, the National Institutes of Health had awarded a total of $5 billion in stimulus funding — nearly half of the $10 billion appropriation that NIH will disburse over two years under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

The $5 billion figure includes both grants and contracts, however. For grants alone, NIH had awarded approximately $4.4 billion via 12,789 ARRA grants as of Oct. 7, according to the database.

The 970 grants awarded to 'omics projects comprise 7.5 percent of the stimulus grants awarded so far, but the total funding awarded to these projects makes up 14 percent of NIH ARRA grant funding to date.

The largest share of grants — 194 — went to bioinformatics and computational biology projects, for a total of $92.4 million in funding.

Sequencing projects snagged the most amount of total funding, however, with 88 grants worth $129.8 million.

Those disciplines were followed by:

• projects and centers focused on translational research and systems biology, which garnered 148 grants totaling $100 million;
• proteomics projects — including instrumentation grants for mass spectrometers and nuclear magnetic resonance systems — which were awarded 141 grants totaling $57.2 million;
• projects that involved RNAi, microRNAs, and other non-coding RNAs, which snagged 93 awards worth a total of $29 million;
• pharmacogenomics and personalized medicine projects, which were granted 80 awards worth $45.2 million;
• biochips and microarrays — excluding genome-wide association studies — which netted 63 awards worth $33.3 million;
• GWAS studies, which were awarded 28 grants worth $42.8 million;
• epigenomics projects, which received 38 awards totaling $26.1 million;
• metabolomics studies, which garnered 11 grants worth a total of $5.5 million; and
• metagenomics efforts, which received 8 grants worth $6.9 million.

There were 134 grants, worth a total of $113.6 million, awarded to genomics projects that did not fall into any of the above categories (see below for a breakout of the number of grants and the funding amounts awarded to each discipline).

The research institutes that picked up the lion's share of the 970 'omics awards were the University of Washington, with 27 grants worth $24.3 million; Harvard/Harvard Medical School with 26 grants worth $19.8 million; and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and Stanford University with 22 grants each worth $18.7 million and $11.8 million, respectively.

The University of Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins University, and Brigham and Women's hospital were each awarded 19 'omics grants, worth $22.1 million, $10.7 million, and $12.5 million respectively.

The Broad Institute, which was awarded 14 'omics stimulus grants, snagged the most total funding, with $33 million.

The largest single 'omics stimulus award, worth $12.2 million, went to Eric Boerwinkle at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center for a project entitled, "Building on GWAS for NHLBI-Diseases: The CHARGE Consortium."

Other 'omics awards in the double-digit million range went to Wash U, which received $10 million for "Center for Large-Scale Genome Sequencing and Analysis;" the Broad Institute, which received $10.2 million for "Comprehensive Sequencing and Analysis of Variation in NHLBI Cohorts;" and the University of Washington, which received $11 million for "Northwest Genomics Center."

The average amount for 'omics stimulus awards was $644,807, compared to an average of $340,524 for all NIH ARRA awards.

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Editor's note: the number of grants and total funding in the subcategories is greater than the 970 grants and $625 million cited in the article due to some grants being counted in more than one category.

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