The National Institutes of Health awarded $20.7 million in research grants to the scientists at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation in 2002. This represents a 31.8% leap from 2001, when OMRF scientists secured a then-record $15.7 million in NIH funds.
Over the past four years, the foundation’s NIH funding has nearly tripled – from $7.76 million in 1998 to the current $20.7 million level. With an annual growth rate of 27.8 percent in NIH funding over this period, OMRF has outpaced all but one of the 88 members of the Association of Independent Research Institutes, an organization that encompasses most major independent biomedical research institutes in the U.S. During this same period, OMRF has also eclipsed top research universities such as Stanford, Yale and the University of Pennsylvania in terms of NIH growth rate.
“I could not be more proud of our scientists,” said OMRF president J. Donald Capra, M.D. “National Institutes of Health grants are awarded only after competition with the finest researchers in the country, and these numbers prove that OMRF’s scientists can compete with anybody.
With 43 principal investigators, OMRF averages more than $480,000 in annual NIH grant funding per scientist. Scientists at OMRF accounted for almost 32 percent of the $64.9 million in NIH grants awarded to researchers in the state of Oklahoma in 2002.
In terms of total NIH research dollars, OMRF now ranks 15th among the 88 members of the Association of Independent Research Institutes.
The 47 NIH grants awarded to OMRF scientists encompassed research on a wide spectrum of diseases and disorders, ranging from arthritis to Alzheimer’s disease and cancer.
Among the grants was a $654,000 award to John Harley, M.D., Ph.D., to study lupus in African-American families. Lupus is a chronic inflammatory disease in which a person’s immune system attacks its own cells and tissues; it most commonly affects the joints, skin, kidneys, central nervous system, hearts and lungs. Harley and his team of OMRF researchers have identified a genetic association that seems to operate primarily in African-American families and may lead to pinpointing the genes responsible for causing this disease, which has no known cure and can be fatal.
Chartered in 1946, OMRF is a private, non-profit, biomedical research institute that focuses its research on Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, cancer, heart disease, AIDS, diabetes, lupus and other autoimmune diseases, stroke, children’s diseases and genetic disorders.
