Trends in NIH Funding to Medical Schools in 2011 and 2020

To examine trends in National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding to U.S. medical schools and their academic departments and the amount of awards provided by each of the NIH institutes.

All data on NIH awards to U.S. medical schools from 2000 to 2020 are publicly available and were obtained from the NIH Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tools and Blue Ridge Institute for Medical Research. These data include the value and number of awards to each medical school, medical school department, medical school location, principal investigator, and the NIH awarding institute. Trends in the inflation-adjusted awards from 2011 to 2020 were calculated and a comparison of the awards made in 2011 and 2020 was performed.

The total NIH budget increased by 16.1% from 2011 to 2020. The allocation of NIH funds to medical schools increased 26.3% ($13.7 billion to $17.3 billion) during this interval. In 2020, 29.3% of all medical school NIH funds were allocated to departments of internal medicine/medicine. Psychiatry was the second ranking department, which was followed, in order, by pediatrics, neurology, and microbiology/immunology/virology. The National Cancer Institute, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute were the top medical school funding institutes in 2011 and 2020. Medical schools as a group continue to receive the greatest percentage of NIH funding. Funding to clinical science departments increased by a larger percentage than that to basic science departments (35.3% vs 10.9%, respectively) over the 2011-2020 interval.

Funding for clinical science departments is increasing at a faster rate than that of basic science departments. However, that so much investigation in basic science and clinical science departments is performed by personnel with a PhD degree indicates the goals and methods of the basic and clinical sciences may not be so different.