Researchers Seek Out Local Foundations When NIH Rejects Their Grant Proposals

For countless scientists, it's a vicious cycle. They need funds to turn their exploratory research into more viable projects, yet the National Institutes of Health tends to reject grant applications for investigations that are still in the early stages. So what's a researcher to do? The answer may be to turn away from the large, national agencies and toward small, local ones, a prime example of which is the Bryn Mawr, Pa.-based W.W. Smith Charitable Trust. George Preti, organic chemist and senior researcher at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, was faced with this problem in 1987, when NIH declined to fund his search for a new technique for the early detection of cancer. Like many scientists seeking support in the early stages of research, he did not have sufficient data to qualify for an NIH grant. To get the money to broaden his studies and generate the kind of data NIH requires, Preti went to a local source, the W.W. Smith trust, a private foundation funding basic medical research in cancer, heart disease, and AIDS in the Philadelphia area. W.W. Smith is one of many small, relatively unpublicized private and local foundations nationwide that fund scientists unable to find financial backing in other places. Some of these researchers, often postdocs, are not yet established in the scientific community, while others, like Preti, are developing new lines of inquiry. Says Bruce M. Brown, trust administrator at W.W. Smith, "All other things being equal between two proposals, I think there is an interest by the trustees in helping to fund protocols which somehow are considered by our reviewers to be innovative or different." Preti received a two-year grant of $60,000 from W.W. Smith to help him get his new line of research off the ground. Recalling the NIH decision, he says the members of his team were not surprised at the rejection. "That was sort of our gut feeling of what would happen," he says. "We did not receive rave reviews at NIH, but the Smith people and several other foundations were much more generous in both their review and their support. It was exploratory research, and they gave the venture capital for it, if you will." Preti is investigating the composition of expired lung air to see if volatiles (molecules that have a vapor pressure at ambient temperatures and float in the air) might provide diagnostic information about internal lung processes--in particular, about bronchogenic carcinoma. He has started to look at people who are at risk for lung cancer to see if they are developing indicators his research has uncovered. With some preliminary data developed with inhouse funds and the additional support from W.W. Smith and other foundations, Preti has been able to study enough subjects to "make a viable publication out of it," he says, and even start a new area of research into the use of volatiles to detect cancer. Preti's cancer research complements his studies of human odors, investigations he has been conducting for more than two decades. The W.W. Smith Charitable Trust was established in 1977 through the will of William Wikoff Smith, who died of a heart attack the year before at age 57. Smith was president of Kewanee Oil and Gas Co., which was sold to Gulf Oil after his death. The Smith trustees determined that funds for medical research would focus on heart disease and cancer, primarily because these diseases ran in the Smith family. AIDS research was added to the funding program in the spring of 1987 in an acknowledgment of the devastating nature of the disease and its link to cancer. The W.W. Smith trust also makes charitable grants to human service programs for children, the poor, and the aged. In addition, the trust supports financial-aid programs for college students. However, nearly 50 percent of Smith money goes to medical research. In the two-year period from July 1987 to June 1989, 51 grants were awarded in the medical area for a total of $5.3 million. Heart disease got 50 percent of the total allotted for medical research, cancer 40 percent, and AIDS 10 percent. In 1988, Jan Thurin, associate professor at the Philadelphia-based Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology, a nonprofit institution doing basic biomedical research, received a two-year grant of $161,414 from W.W. Smith. The money funded his AIDS-related study, "Immunogenicity of glycopeptides as related to small gp120 of HIV-1." Thurin says he is pleased with the amount he received from the Smith trust. "They pay you what you need. You can employ somebody and have money for the supplies and a little something for yourself. That's what it's enough for, on a modest scale." With the money provided by W.W. Smith, Thurin has been able to "harden" his data. This, in turn, enabled him to obtain a grant from NIH which begins this fall, just as the Smith money is running out. W.W. Smith is not in the business of providing major funds for large projects. In the period 1987-89, the low and high amounts the trust awarded were $29,403 and $250,000, respectively. The trustees have awarded as little as $3,000 for a lecture series, says Louise A. Havens, grant administrator at W.W. Smith. There is no defined upper limit, but $300,000 is about as much as Smith awards with a single grant. Awards larger than $200,000 generally cover three years of research. W.W. Smith focuses on basic rather than applied research, a welcome development, according to Thurin. "I think that Smith, by helping new people start up, is helping basic [science]," he says. In 1982, the Smith trustees added a peer review process to help deal with the large number of applications they were receiving. Peer review takes place once a year. There are three reviewers for each research field--heart disease, cancer, and AIDS. Each must have reviewed proposals for Smith for no more than five years, have an M.D. or Ph.D. degree, and have demonstrated competence in his or her field. In addition, "to reduce even the appearance, and certainly the reality, of conflict of interest," according to Brown, the trustees require that reviewers not currently reside in the Philadelphia area. The reviewers do not meet. W.W. Smith's ratio of acceptances to applications is approximately 1 to 3, but that does not tell the whole, intensely competitive story. "We're compressing the denominator," explains Brown, by allowing only two applications per disease from each institution for each grant cycle. Thus, the institutions themselves are responsible for much of the weeding-out process. Havens recalls one case of an institution that sent too many applications: "We said, `You pick which one you take back, or they all go back.'" Adds Brown, "We could hear the weeping and gnashing all the way out here." Some researchers believe one advantage of local funding is the opportunity it affords scientists to meet personally with the grant makers. At W.W. Smith, site visits are a stipulation of the trusteeship, and although administrators of the trust do not meet with every funded scientist, they do meet with many of them. Anna Marie Skalka, director of the Institute for Cancer Research at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, has met with the Smith administrators and believes this local interaction is significant. "It's important to the scientist to know they have the support of people in their community, and it's important for people in the community not to just leave everything to the federal government," she says. "I think it's an important way of getting funding, even if NIH were more generous." Skalka and Fox Chase postdoc Joseph Kulkoski received a two-year grant of $145,530 from W.W. Smith in 1988 for their molecular analysis of HIV integration. They also had applied for support to the American Foundation for AIDS Research (AMFAR), a national foundation, but withdrew that application, largely because the Smith money came through faster, some six to eight months ahead of the AMFAR decision. (The trust generally notifies applicants within six months of the application deadline.) "At NIH, everything is like a pregnancy. It takes nine months to gestate before you get an answer," says Preti. "Now that there are more federal funding cutbacks, Smith has an important niche to fill--to fund things that are more speculative and things that need a little bit of preliminary data before they can be funded in a more grandiose manner by NIH or [the National Science Foundation]." W.W. Smith requires that an applicant be affiliated with an institution located in Philadelphia or its neighboring counties. Applications must be received by June 15 for cancer and AIDS research and by September 15 for heart research. Write to The W.W. Smith Charitable Trust, Suite 200, 101 Bryn Mawr Ave., Bryn Mawr, Pa. 19010. Researchers wishing to locate other local foundations may find that a good place to start is the Foundations Directory, published by the Foundations Center, 79 Fifth Ave., New York, N.Y. 10003. The directory is available in libraries. Bruce Silver is a freelance writer based in Philadelphia.

Researchers Seek Out Local Foundations When NIH Rejects Their Grant Proposals

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