$150m funding announced in NHMRC project grants

The annual competition for research grants from the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) has been fought and and won -- and 406 projects have won the prestigious, peer-reviewed right to share in this year's funding pool of $150 million.

The Federal Minister for Health and Aging, Senator Kay Patterson, this morning released the names of the principal instigators whose projects will be funded under the latest round of NHMRC grants.

The grants will become available to researchers from January onwards and will fund biomedical, clinical, public health and health services research projects. The total funding, of $150 million for the 2003 grants, is up slightly on last year's amount.

Prof Warwick Anderson, chair of the NHMRC Research Committee, said the number of grants applications has risen from 1600 to 1900 in the past two years. Competition remains intense, with only 24 per cent -- or just under one in five -- of grant applications being successful this year.

Anderson said the percentage of projects funded has remained approximately constant, despite two years of substantial increases in overall funding since 1999-2000, when the Commonwealth announced it would double NHMRC funding over the following five years, in line with the recommendations of the Wills Review.

Following the trend established last year, Anderson said, this year's project grants are, on average, around 10 per cent larger -- in line with the Wills Report recommendation that more funds should go to projects of "larger scale, scope and duration".

Only $8.2 million from this year's pool has gone to establish new projects, of which there are 26.

"We're also making it clearer to researchers that we want to fund projects across the whole range from health services to molecular biology, so we're getting increased interest from less traditional areas of research," Anderson said.

Asked if this year's application review process had placed greater weight on potential commercial outcomes, Anderson said grants were always judged according to complex factors, with research merit being paramount.

Merit took into account scientific excellence, the track-record of the investigator, the number and value of patents arising from the research, and commercial achievements.

Anderson said this year's grants had again highlighted the "striking difference" between Victoria and the other states.

In Victoria 140 health and medical projects have garnered grants totalling over $55 million, or more than 35 per cent of the total funding pool, compared with 102 projects for NSW, which received grants worth $35 million, or 24 per cent of the total.

Figures for other states were:

• Queensland -- 58 projects, $21 million (14.5 per cent)
• WA -- 42 projects, $14 million (10 per cent)
• SA -- 33 projects, $10 million (7.3 per cent)
• ACT -- 22 projects, $7 million (5 per cent)
• NT - 7 projects, $4 million (3 per cent)
• Tasmania -- 2 projects, $0.5 million (0.4 per cent)