Paying for the basics
Matthew Meyer of DFCI's Office of Research confers with Yu-Tzu Tai, PhD.
Government research agencies have long recognized that in addition to their own funding needs, scientists consume a portion of their facilities' electricity, heating, computer networks, and myriad other fixed costs. So grants from NIH agencies include a certain amount for these "indirect" costs, known as "overhead." However, many nonprofit foundations don't provide money for these expenses, which means that Dana-Farber has to draw more on other sources.
"Today, more and more of our support is from funders who don't pay for infrastructure," says Dorothy Puhy, DFCI's chief financial officer, "so our subsidy for direct and indirect research costs has increased to about $20 million annually." If gifts from foundations and donors don't help cover equipment, labs, and similar costs, she observes, it creates a dilemma: "We don't have the infrastructure to use the funding that has been earmarked for specific needs."
Among Dana-Farber's cost-saving measures are core research facilities covering such areas as molecular diagnostics and biostatistics. Shared by many scientists, "these facilities provide economies of scale and state of-the-art technology that no single investigator could afford," notes Senior Vice President for Research Faye Austin, PhD. "We're working to keep these cores at the cutting edge."
Conducting research has become significantly more expensive. Part of the reason is the need to pay scientists higher salaries — more than what they would receive from NIH funding alone — to remain competitive as an employer with other academic institutions or for-profit companies. The nuts and bolts of research also carry higher price tags in the new era of high-tech biology that's been accelerated by the sequencing of the human genome and other developments.
"The hope is that once we've been able to get preliminary data from this research, we'll be in a position to leverage this into a larger federally funded project."
— Matthew Kulke, MD
For example, the tiny chips that scientists now use to analyze activity in a cell's genes may cost $1,000 each, and they are used only once. Sridhar Ramaswamy, MD, of DFCI Medical Oncology estimates that the cost of a single experiment using numerous gene chips and other cutting-edge equipment could amount to $100,000 — taking salaries into account as well.
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