This page is intended as an emerging information source about centers programs administered by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The majority of the material on this page comes from the Institute of Medicine's study to assess the use of research center grants by NIH. (Link to the study website.)

Short synopsis of the study:
The IOM will conduct a one-year study of the use of research center grants by the National Institutes of Health. The study will focus on the criteria and procedures used in deciding to adopt the use of centers, how they are designed and administered, comparisons with other mechanisms of research support, their impacts and costs, and how they are evaluated as a mechanism (as well as how individual centers are evaluated). The emphasis will be on how NIH uses centers as a program mechanism, compared with other mechanisms, rather than on how individual centers are chosen for awards.

An excellent December 2002 background paper (not available at the above website) can be downloaded here: NIH-Funded Centers of Excellence.

Some key excerpts from the paper are included below:

Congress has asked the Institute of Medicine to conduct a study of the use of “centers of excellence” by the NIH, identify the distinctive advantages of supporting centers rather than using alternative mechanisms such as individual investigator grants, and recommend criteria for deciding when the establishment of centers of excellence is the most effective means of carrying out the mission of NIH. The purpose of this paper is to review the genesis of the congressional request, describe the development and extent of centers programs at NIH, and analyze the issues involved in undertaking the study.

The number of NIH-funded research centers has grown steadily during the past 30 years, typically established at the urging of Congress, although the percentage of the NIH budget devoted explicitly to extramural research center awards has been steady at approximately 9 percent for at least the past 15 years. Currently, in FY2002, NIH reports that it is funding 1,144 research centers, compared with 868 centers in 1992. Appendix A is a partial listing of centers programs by institute.

NIH awards a great many grants and cooperative agreements for a mechanism it calls “research centers,” currently more than 1,100 by its own count, but there is tremendous variation in the purposes and activities of the entities funded by these grants and not all of them are the type of center that Congress seems to be asking the Institute of Medicine to study.

Aggregate Trends. In January 2002, when NIH submitted its FY 2003 budget request to Congress, it was funding 1,144 research center awards at a cost of nearly $2.2 billion dollars. It requested an increase of $339 million for 1,211 center grants in FY 2003 (Appendix B). The proposed budget increase was just slightly more than the overall increase for NIH (15.9 percent versus 15.6 percent) and maintained the 9 percent share that center grants constitute of the NIH budget.

Funding for centers grants has generally increased in line with the overall NIH budget in recent years, constituting between 8.5 percent and 8.9 percent of all NIH funding during the 1992-2001 period.

Trends by Institute. Leaving aside NCRR as a special case, NCI had the most centers in FY2001 (140), with NHLBI coming in a distant second (81) (Table 1). The median institute, NIDA, had 33 centers.

Trends by Mechanism. Focusing on the main types of research center awards—P30 core grants, P50/U54 specialized centers, and P60 comprehensive centers—specialized centers were the most numerous in 2001 (383).

Recap. The number of awards classified as research centers totaled 1,120 in 2001, and cost $1.9 billion. This was about 9 percent of the NIH budget. Most institutes allocated a smaller percentage of their budget to centers (the median was 5.9 percent), while a few, notably NCRR and NHGRI, devoted much more and drove up the mean average. After inflation, funding of centers increased 82 percent from 1992. Because this was roughly the same rate of increase in the NIH budget as a whole, centers did not increase their share of NIH funding appreciably. The situation is not expected change in the next few years, although the ramp-up of P20 grants for the IdeA Program and other new center programs, along with the establishment of bioterrorism centers may change that. For now, at least, the President’s budget for FY2003 would give centers 33 percent more funding than in FY2001, the same as the increase in total funding of NIH, in current dollars.

Other key sections of paper:

1. Synthesis of the major advantages that justify centers or center programs.
2. Responses to specific questions asked by Congress.