Boosting Biomedical Research Capacity: The Role of INBRE-Supported Core Facility Vouchers in IDeA States

Research universities and institutes invest in building core facilities that allow investigators to access the costly instrumentation and specialized expertise needed to perform cutting edge biomedical research. For the past 30 years, the National Institutes of Health has supported the Institutional Development Award (IDeA) initiative which supports research capacity, including core facility construction, in U.S. states which receive disproportionately little NIH funding. IDeA Network of Biomedical Research Excellence (INBRE) programs particularly support research in primarily undergraduate institutions (PUI) and other resource constrained sites, and have built core facilities intended to broaden access to biomedical research training to students enrolled at PUIs. However, researchers in IDeA states (especially those working at PUIs), often lack the funding needed to pay core facility user fees needed to collect preliminary data for grant applications or key experiments needed for publications, which reduces investigator competitiveness for future funding. In order to overcome this hurdle, INBRE programs serving 12 different states have developed voucher programs that support core facility access. Here we describe the structure of these programs and provide evidence from one state (Delaware) that these modest investments have a significant impact on research productivity as measured by downstream publications and grants, while also fostering the viability of research core facilities by building demand for core services. Across the country, INBRE-supported Core Voucher programs contribute significantly to the biomedical research enterprise fueling future research and innovation.