The Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation announced today that its scientists secured $22.99 million in research grants and contracts from the National Institutes of Health in 2003. This total surpasses OMRF’s previous record of $20.7 million, set in 2002.
OMRF’s 45 principal scientists secured, on average, $510,000 in NIH funding per scientist. “Our scientists are obtaining grants at a rate on par with the Yales and Stanfords of the world,” said OMRF President J. Donald Capra, M.D.
“If Oklahoma wants to become the research capital of the Plains, it’s not a question of getting better,” Capra said. “It’s simply a matter of attracting more scientists like the ones we already have.”
2003 is the fifth consecutive year in which OMRF has enjoyed a record-breaking year of NIH funding. Since 1998, when OMRF obtained $7.76 million in NIH grants and contracts, the foundation’s NIH funding has grown at an average annual rate of more than 24 percent, outpacing every major medical research institution in the country save one. OMRF’s NIH funding now ranks it among the top 20 independent medical research institutes in the U.S.
“The NIH is the leading supporter of biomedical research in the U.S., and NIH dollars are the gold standard, the true measure of innovation and success,” Capra said. “These numbers once again show that OMRF and Oklahoma are home to some of the world’s most talented and productive scientists.”
The individual grants ranged from $15,000 to more than $2 million. The research topics were equally diverse, ranging from the potential role a common cold virus plays in causing the autoimmune disease lupus to the use of genetically modified mice in studying various illnesses (anthrax, smallpox, plague) that might result from a bioterror attack.
In the past, NIH grants have helped to fund OMRF research that led to a pair of life-saving drugs: Xigris, the first and only FDA-approved treatment for severe sepsis (a deadly disease that claims more than 500,000 lives each year), and Ceprotin, which physicians use to treat children suffering from life-threatening blood-clotting complications. NIH funds have also helped OMRF scientists make discoveries that spawned four experimental drugs now in the late stages of human clinical trials, including a treatment for acute stroke, the third leading cause of death in this country.
“National Institutes of Health grants give our scientists the tools to achieve OMRF’s mission – making discoveries that improve human health,” said Capra.
In addition to the $22.99 million in NIH funds, OMRF secured more that $7 million in competitive research funding from other sources in 2003, which pushed the foundation’s total annual grant funding to more than $30 million, another milestone. These additional grants come from nonprofit sources such as the American Heart Association, federal and state agencies like the National Science Foundation and the Oklahoma Center for the Advancement of Science and Technology, and pharmaceutical companies.
OMRF (
www.omrf.org) is a nonprofit biomedical research institute dedicated to understand and curing human disease. Its scientists focus on such critical research areas as cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, lupus and cardiovascular disease. OMRF is home to Oklahoma’s only Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and only member of the National Academy of Sciences in the area of biomedical research.
