NHMRC restructures grant funding program

The National Health and Medical Research Council has restructured its grant program following a major review. 

The new program will “reduce the burden on researchers in applying for funding across different funding schemes by providing consolidated five-year grants for our high-performing researchers at all stages of their careers”, said Health Minister Greg Hunt. 

The government provides more than $800 million through the NHMRC each year to fund life-changing research. The total amount of funding available in the Medical Research Endowment Account will remain the same but the new structure will consolidate the existing NHMRC funding schemes into four streams: Investigator Grants; Synergy Grants; Ideas Grants; and Strategic and Leveraging Grants.

Investigator Grants will consolidate separate fellowship and research support into one grant scheme that will provide the highest-performing researchers at all career stages with funding for their salary (if required) and a significant research support package.

Synergy Grants will provide $5 million per grant for outstanding multidisciplinary research teams to work together to answer complex questions.

Ideas Grants will support innovative and creative research projects and be available to researchers with bright ideas at all career stages, including early and mid-career researchers.

Strategic and Leveraging Grants will support research that addresses identified national needs. This will include an enhanced Targeted Calls for Research scheme and a dedicated funding stream for clinical trials and cohort studies. It also includes existing schemes such as Centres of Research Excellence, Development Grants, international collaborative schemes and Partnerships for Better Health (Partnership Centres and Partnership Projects).

To allow the consolidation of salary and research support to individual researchers, the approximate MREA allocation to individual researchers will increase from about 16% (salary only) to about 40% (salary and research support package). The Equipment Grants scheme and the Independent Research Institute Infrastructure Support Scheme (IRIISS) funding have been included under Strategic and Leveraging Grants. Funding will continue to be provided based on rigorous expert (peer) review of applications to ensure transparency, probity and fairness. 

Implementation timeline

The implementation of new funding schemes will begin in late 2018–early 2019. NHMRC is developing comprehensive transitional arrangements to the new structure, which will be phased in over the next 18 months. NHMRC will call for applications for the restructured program in late 2018–early 2019, for peer review during 2019 and funding starting in 2020.

Transitional arrangements will begin in late 2017 and include the introduction of capping for Project Grants, the application of a new framework for assessment and funding of clinical trials and large cohort studies, and the cessation of the current Program Grant scheme. In order to avoid unnecessary duplication of schemes, there will be no Program Grant round in 2018 (for funding in 2020) as this scheme will be replaced by the Synergy Grant scheme (first applications in 2019 for funding in 2020). 

Boost for early-mid career researchers

“The improvements to NHMRC’s funding program will provide more opportunities for promising researchers early in their careers, ensuring future generations of world-leading Australian researchers,” said Hunt. 

Commenting on the changes, Dr Brian Oliver, who leads the Respiratory Molecular Pathogenesis Group at UTS and the Woolcock Institute, said, "On face value, the changes to the NHMRC grant system are going to benefit upcoming researchers, whilst simultaneously making it more difficult for the few superstars in Australia who hold four to six grants as Chief Investigator A [the researcher that has overall responsibility for the project].”

Limits on the number of grants 

To complement the consolidation of funding and to reduce the application and review burden, limits will be placed on the number of grants that can be applied for or held by an individual researcher

“I would expect that the large universities have the most to lose with the new system. However, researchers are clever and within a few days will have worked out how to game the system to their advantage,” said Dr Oliver.

“Stronger restrictions on the number of grants per researcher is an interesting move,” said Associate Professor Adrian Barnett from the School of Public Health and Social Work at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT). “For obvious reasons, researchers with stellar track records get more funding, but I have seen situations where these stellar researchers have taken on too many grants and so the quality of their work goes down.

“The planned restrictions may benefit our talented early-career researchers who have more capacity to do the work and, in some cases, were the ones doing the work anyway behind the nominal stellar researcher.

“However, an analysis of restricting grants to two per investigator at the US National Institutes of Health found that it would increase the grant success rate by just 2%, so perhaps it won’t have much impact.”

Clinical research

The changes will also provide opportunities for clinical researchers, who split their time between research and caring for their patients, said Hunt. 

“There will be a new scheme to encourage more creative and innovative research ideas, a dedicated scheme for clinical trials and cohort studies, and a $5 million boost to most outstanding research teams,” he said.

A separate clinical trials and cohort studies scheme will allow NHMRC to be more flexible and responsive to the needs of investigators and the studies they are conducting. It will make it possible to establish appropriate scheme-specific requirements and to introduce assessment criteria that are more suited to determining the relevance of the question, the appropriateness of the design and the feasibility of clinical trials and cohort studies.

“The new program will support research across the spectrum, from discovery through to translation and commercialisation of new therapies and devices, and the implementation of new policies and practices, tackling the challenges facing our health system,” said Hunt.

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