Top 50 NIH-Funded Institutions of 2019

The great American political divide shows no sign of ending as the United States lurches toward the 2020 presidential election. However, one of the few areas where the parties have joined together in recent years has been where NIH funding is concerned.

Days after President Donald Trump proposed a 12% cut in NIH funding, to $34.368 billion, as part of his proposed $4.75 trillion budget for the 2020 federal fiscal year, leaders in Congress—on both sides of the proverbial aisle—made it clear they wouldn’t go along.

“I am going to work as hard as I can,” House Appropriations Committee Chair Nita Lowey (D-NY) promised April 2 at a budget hearing, “to give you as much money as we can, because you have the brilliance, you have the commitment, and you have the determination. All you need is more money.” Lowey’s Committee backed up those words on May 8 by approving a spending bill for the Labor-HHS-Education portion of the federal budget that would raise NIH spending by 5.12% year-over-year, to $41.084 billion—though the panel voted along party lines, 30-23.

Senate Appropriations Chair Richard Shelby (R-AL) reassured NIH officials at an April 11 hearing of his committee: “I’m not interested in cutting your budget. I’m interested in increasing it.” The panel has yet to vote on its version of a spending bill, though last year it too voted for a significant increase before both chambers of Congress agreed to hike FY 2019 NIH spending 5.6%, to $39.084 billion—about $2 billion over the previous fiscal year and 12% above Trump’s initial $34.8 billion proposal.

A similar outcome this year would be welcome news for the NIH and advocates of increased research funding. As NIH disclosed on its website in March, about 83% of the agency’s budget supports extramural research. In FY2018, NIH issued 47,000 competing and non-competing research project grant (RPG) awards totaling about $26 billion. NIH extramural dollars supported research conducted at more than 2,700 organizations—including universities, medical schools, and other research institutions in every U.S. state and worldwide.

About 10% of the NIH’s budget supports projects conducted by nearly 6,000 scientists in its own laboratories, most of which are on the NIH campus in Bethesda, MD.

Below is a list of 50 universities (including medical schools), research institutions, and teaching hospitals ranked by how much in NIH funding they have received during the current 2019 federal fiscal year, through May 27. FY 2019 ends on September 30. Also included for each NIH grant recipient is the number of grant awards funded in FY 2019, which was not a factor in the ranking.

This year’s Top 50 List nearly parallels GEN’s Top 10 U.S. Biopharma Clusters A-List (published in September 2018 and set to be updated later this year) when it comes to state-by-state funding trends.

Among the 25 states with at least one institution among the top 50 listed here, California leads the nation with seven institutions receiving NIH grant funding. Next-highest are Massachusetts and New York, with six NIH-funded institutions. These three states combined accounted for more than one-third (19) of the top 50 NIH-funded institutions in the current 2019 federal fiscal year.

Those states were followed by Ohio with three institutions, then seven states with two institutions each (Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Washington state). Another 14 states have a single NIH-funded institution among the top 50 listed here.

Worth watching are institutions that ranked 55 through 51—a group that includes top-tier research venues: University of Rochester (NY), Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis (which made last year’s Top 50 A-List and was Indiana’s sole institution on that list), Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia,  Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and University of Florida, which just missed the top 50 with $64,782,221 through 171 awards.

Top 50 NIH-Funded Institutions of 2019