AAMC Reporter: May 2006

Fundraisers Think Globally, Act Locally for Research Support

Louis J. "Skip" Elsas in the University of Miami Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine's new Biochemical Genetics Lab

With the days of the doubling long past, and ongoing "flat" funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) turning into a fait accompli, many leaders in academic medicine are bolstering traditional revenue streams with more innovative approaches to research funding.

"As federal funding dries up, and competition increases for the funds that are there, we're looking for new revenue," says Michael J. Friedlander, Ph.D., Wilhelmina Robertson professor and chair of neuroscience and director of neuroscience initiatives at Baylor College of Medicine. "That includes many different sources — state and local governments, community foundations and agencies, and individuals."

While the new tactics vary among institutions, the overall approach to fundraising currently seems to be think globally, act locally.

"Community-oriented foundations can be a good source," notes Louis J. "Skip" Elsas, M.D., professor and director of The John T. Macdonald Foundation Center for Medical Genetics at the University of Miami, which was established with a $16 million gift from The John T. Macdonald Foundation, based in nearby Coral Gables, Fla.

"Find out what your community foundations have and want. A lot of them want to see their communities grow, and they're interested in talking about health care, education, and fundamental science," Elsas said.

"We all know about the big foundations," Friedlander says. "But one of the ways individual institutions can find new means is within their local philanthropic communities in a city, a state, or a region."

Robert J. Desnick, M.D., Ph.D., professor and chairman of Mount Sinai School of Medicine's Department of Human Genetics, says his department, with the help of patients, parents, and families who have suffered from genetic diseases, established the Genetic Disease Foundation, a not-for-profit philanthropic fundraising entity for the department.

"The foundation was started by several appreciative patients, and has held annual or biannual fundraising galas," Desnick says. "In addition to the galas, the foundation hosts annual informational cocktail parties to recruit new foundation members."

Desnick says the foundation galas have produced more than $2 million in donations to the department, which have been used to purchase various state-of-the-art equipment for genomic and proteomic research.

"This equipment facilitates the research of all departmental faculty in general rather than targeting donations to specific diseases. This has been a great boon to our research programs.

"The foundation convinced its members that research on genetic diseases is markedly enhanced by state-of-the-art equipment. Genetic diseases share common themes and mechanisms so what is learned about one disease relates to many, and that a treatment developed for one may be applicable to others." Perhaps the most ambitious localized fundraising effort, however, is taking place at the University of Minnesota Medical School. To fund five new research facilities, university officials in March asked the state legislature to set up a new entity — dubbed the Minnesota Biomedical Sciences Research Facilities Authority — and fund it with $330 million in state bonds. That would cover 90 percent of the facility costs, with the university footing the rest.

Frank B. Cerra, M.D., the University of Minnesota's senior vice president for health sciences, said the bill establishing the authority enjoys bipartisan support, and "prospects look good" for its passage.

If approved, the new authority, which Cerra helped conceive after studying similar authorities established for highway projects, would finance one entire facility every two years over a 10-year period as a way of avoiding the usual bonding process for large projects, for which smaller chunks are approved piecemeal, resulting in much longer wait times.

 "We just need [the bonds] spaced out in a predictable funding model so we can plan and target recruiting," Cerra says. "You can't do this [amount of money] in a normal bonding bill, because there's not enough space. It's usually $5 million to $7 million per capital project, and these projects are tens of millions each. So we conceived the idea of creating this bonding authority."

As a way of staying receptive to state taxpayers, Cerra says each facility is approved individually, with decisions potentially based on the performance of the previous facility.

"Before we get the next [facility], people can ask, are we producing new intellectual property, 'are we recruiting faculty?' It really builds our public accountability."

Think Globally

Fundraising experts say, however, that new strategies involve far more than simply concentrating efforts on potential community- or state-level donors and institutions. Another key part of the formula lies in taking a wide-angled approach when making a pitch for funding, and casting a wide net for the kinds of partners, local and otherwise, that may not have been considered as good sources in the past.

Miami's Elsas says the crucial moment in fundraising is the presentation to possible benefactors, which should be both thorough and easily accessible.

"We don't ever talk down to [donors]," Elsas says. "You take the scientific jargon and put it in public terms. When you go to a foundation, you go and meet the board members on an interpersonal basis, and you tell them, 'this is my vision.' We show them diagrams. You have to be prepared to tell them exactly what you would do with their money. And we meet with our foundations socially as well. There has to be a lot of interaction." 

Cerra says schools are increasingly making these presentations to the business sector.

"The next big phase is public/private partnerships," Cerra predicts. "It's a big shift in how we do business. We need to partner in areas where we can do things better together."

Nancy C. Andrews, M.D., Harvard Medical School's dean for basic sciences and graduate studies, says public-private partnerships can be fruitful, as long as strong conflict of interest standards are in place to prevent industry tampering.

"Conflict of interest standards are very important, not only for the health of a patient who might potentially be compromised, but so that investigators won't become distracted, and won't push students or fellows to do something that wouldn't otherwise be in their best academic interests," Andrews says. "We've had some great success stories with industry funding projects here…we see this as very important, not only to fill the NIH gap, but also because it brings people together to bring discoveries to the public more quickly."

Baylor's Friedlander says partnerships not only between public and private institutions, but within the school itself, are important in order to present a longitudinal and united front when making the case for charitable or other gifts.

"One tack we've taken is to partner our clinical side with our basic sciences side in philanthropic efforts," Friedlander says. "We put all our department chairs together to develop programs and presentations that coordinate our most outstanding research with our most outstanding translational results. How is our work complementary and inter-related? You need to show that bench-to-bedside continuum." Andrews says that school officials should help foster greater faculty cooperation and ownership over grants.

"We're trying to encourage collaboration on an individual basis. We're just making introductions," she says. "It helps to find faculty champions to organize grants, and give them the infrastructure they need to work together, decrease the barriers to them applying for grants, and offer incentives to researchers if a grant comes through."

While philanthropic, political, industrial, and academic partnerships are leading the way in the search for innovative funding, other, more unusual ideas are beginning to gain traction, officials say. For Mount Sinai, patent royalties have become fertile ground for departmental revenue.

"If a faculty member has found a new technology or treatment that's been effective in an animal model system, they are encouraged to patent the new discovery," Desnick says. "This has led to a royalty stream for licensing technology and potential therapies. The department uses its share of the funds for faculty recruitment and retention."

Friedlander says a volunteer network called Baylor Research Advocates for Student Scientists (BRASS), is providing living and travel expenses for graduate student researchers who lose salary when grant money runs out. To date, BRASS has raised $1.5 million for these efforts.

"Graduate students do a lot of work at the bench," Friedlander says. "And to a large degree, they are supported by NIH research grants…we worked with the community, and people now 'adopt' graduate students, and provide them with financial support."

And while federal support for the NIH and other federal health care agencies is not as forthcoming as it once was, another federal agency not normally associated with medicine — the National Science Foundation (NSF) — may be a good alternative.

"The NSF has received more funding for research from the administration [a 7.7 percent increase to $4.6 billion]," Friedlander says. "They're not a traditional mainstay of health care funding, but now so much of biomedical research — such as informatix and proteomics — are things the NSF is interested in, so some research can appeal to them."

Desnick, Elsas, and Friedlander were panelists at the AAMC's March 2006 workshop "Can Faculty Afford Not to Fundraise?"

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