National Institutes of Health Funding in Radiation Oncology: A Snapshot

Currently, pay lines for National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants are at a historical low. In this climate of fierce competition, knowledge about the funding situation in a small field like radiation oncology becomes very important for career planning and recruitment of faculty. Unfortunately, these data cannot be easily extracted from the NIH's database because it does not discriminate between radiology and radiation oncology departments. At the start of fiscal year 2013 we extracted records for 952 individual grants, which were active at the time of analysis from the NIH database. Proposals originating from radiation oncology departments were identified manually. Descriptive statistics were generated using the JMP statistical software package. Our analysis identified 197 grants in radiation oncology. These proposals came from 134 individual investigators in 43 academic institutions. The majority of the grants (118) were awarded to principal investigators at the full professor level, and 122 principal investigators held a PhD degree. In 79% of the grants, the research topic fell into the field of biology, 13% in the field of medical physics. Only 7.6% of the proposals were clinical investigations. Our data suggest that the field of radiation oncology is underfunded by the NIH and that the current level of support does not match the relevance of radiation oncology for cancer patients or the potential of its academic work force.