“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it
was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity,
it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope,
it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us.”
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
The issues
In many ways, the Canadian renal researcher lives in privileged times. Never before
has she or he enjoyed such remarkable access to the tools of the trade. Unprecedented
advances in biotechnology, genomics, molecular biology, regenerative medicine, tissue
banking, and computer databases along with the implementation of numerous infrastructure
projects on a scale unparalleled in our history have together luxuriously equipped
our scientific community. We stand poised for breakthroughs that will significantly
impact the renal health of Canadians both tomorrow and well into the future. Thanks
to initiatives such as the federally funded Canada Foundation for Innovation along
with its provincial and local partners, it is not uncommon for both basic and clinician
scientists specializing in nephrology to be employing state-of-the-art equipment,
housed in dozens of newly minted laboratories and research buildings across our country.
Moreover, training programs such as the Kidney Foundation of Canada (KFoC)/Canadian
Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) supported Kidney Research Scientist Core Education
and National Training Program (KRESCENT) initiative have fostered the development
of the next generation of investigators, each eager to contribute to the advancement
of knowledge.
However, the times wherein the Canadian renal researcher lives are also defined by
enormous challenges. Despite the wealth of research infrastructure and an abundance
of well-trained investigators, as in the USA, our national research endeavor seems
to have been designed however, inadvertently, in anticipation of unlimited growth.
Over the past 15 years, universities, hospitals, and research institutes have continued
to hire into new positions in order to fill expanding wet and dry lab space to capacity.
Despite this increase in the hiring of principal investigators, our system continues
to train far more graduate students and postdoctoral fellows than there are positions
in academia, industry, and government. Competition for new investigator spots is fierce,
forcing many individuals to remain in training positions during their most creative
years until either obtaining their first independent position or leaving research
for other career options. These issues have imposed stress upon the system and together
with an unchanging pool of funds available to investigators, have driven down funding
success for many individual research operations.
Not long ago, CIHR funding levels hovered at the 20–27 % range; on some peer-review
committees, this was as high as 40 %, allowing for most applications ranked in the
excellent range (i.e., ≥4.0 on the CIHR scale) to be approved. Recent open operating
grant competitions have seen application pressure steadily increase, placing greater
burdens on both reviewers and their committees. This has created a vicious cycle where
highly ranked proposals line up in the queue, often requiring several resubmissions
before being funded, if at all. With the declining success rates for CIHR applications,
more applicants have sought funding from other agencies, similarly driving up application
pressures and decreasing success rates. The net effect has been that funding rates
with most sources are now at historic lows.
Predictable, long-term funding for research projects has proved increasingly difficult
to sustain as these success rates drop, often forcing labs to lose key staff in order
to endure down cycles. Moreover, the recent devaluation of the Canadian versus American
dollar has further destabilized matters since many consumables are sourced from the
USA. Meanwhile, the capacity for extramural funding agencies such as the Kidney Foundation
of Canada, a longtime supporter of renal research, has remained limited over the past
15 years. Today’s CAD$50,000 per annum, KFoC biomedical research grant has the purchasing
power equivalent to CAD$36,000 in the year 2000. The KFoC is not the lone example
however; fundraising efforts, endowments and industry-based “no-strings-attached”
money have all suffered since the “Great Recession” of 2008. Despite widespread cuts
to most departments, the federal government has not reduced the level of funding to
the CIHR. Unfortunately, the relatively stagnant pool of research dollars has struggled
to keep pace with inflation in biomedical research. The net result of these economic
realities, coupled with an expanding pool of investigators is that today’s renal scientist
is spending more of their time writing a greater number of grant applications in a
far more competitive environment than their peers a generation ago—all at the expense
of carrying out actual research.
New funding structures
At the same time, the CIHR recently introduced significant broad-based changes to
how it evaluates and funds scientific research. At the risk of understating the impact,
the revamped open suites programs (Foundation and Project schemes) has generated a
broad spectrum of opinions among Canada’s scientific research community. A formal
critique of the new format would be premature as the data have not yet been assembled,
disseminated, and interpreted. Moreover, this nascent system remains fluid as it undergoes
adjustments and amendments in response to internal assessments as well as both applicant
and reviewer feedback. For example, it was welcome news that the CIHR recently reversed
its decision to only allow applicants a single opportunity per calendar year to apply
for project grants. If this position had been maintained, researchers’ ability to
acquire funding in a timely manner would have been severely limited.
For the renal research community, the new formats for application and review need
to be disseminated so that kidney disease research maintains an appropriate level
on the Canadian science scene. Importantly, given the implementation of the college
of reviewers, it is essential that those within the renal research community offer
their full participation in the review process. The best minds in kidney disease research
should take their seats at the (virtual) review table so that applications are evaluated
by the most appropriate experts who are intimately familiar with our field. The same
holds true for the updated KFoC Biomedical Research Grant application format and its
review committee. Importantly, the question of whether these new directions will adequately
address the realities facing our collective research endeavor remains unanswered.
Radical options?
Even with such dramatic changes to the funding mechanisms at CIHR, are other options
possible? Our American colleagues are beginning to entertain far more radical changes
to their system. A grass roots movement is emerging in the USA aimed at opening a
dialogue between scientists and institutions to challenge existing research paradigms.
The ideas were presented in two recent essays [1, 2]. The authors summarize the current
plight of scientific research in the US system and propose a number of solutions.
Perhaps surprisingly, a demand for more money was not suggested, despite the recently
announced proposals by the House of Representatives and Senate panels that would increase
the NIH budget by CAD$1.1–2 billion per year. They suggest training fewer postdoctoral
fellows and PhDs, with some of the former being transitioned within labs to the so-called
super-doc positions. The idea is that these highly trained individuals would graduate
to staff-scientists, capable of preserving the intra-laboratory memory and offering
high productivity levels [3]. There is even the idea that funding agencies could mandate
universities to direct a portion of their overhead payments towards creating more
of these types of staff-scientist positions. Another proposal is to cease supporting
graduate students from NIH research grants—relying instead on institutional training
grants and external scholarships.
Meanwhile the authors recommend that funding agencies should be wary of “overfunding”
labs since the law of diminishing returns inevitably kicks in past a certain threshold
of research dollars. Such changes would reduce the number of “megalabs” while encouraging
smaller more sustainable operations—where principal investigators would spend less
time chasing research dollars to fund operations. Moreover, the authors take aim at
the perceived trend towards translational research. They state that “Overvaluing translational
research is detracting from an equivalent appreciation of fundamental research of
broad applicability, without obvious connections to medicine.” [1].
Lastly, the authors suggest that agencies should reward projects that focus on originality
and risk-taking to discourage predictable, incremental research—which inevitably arises
when funding is difficult to obtain, and research results are expected to be translated
in the short term to bear immediate fruit for society. What is often lost is the value
of the long view. Indeed, we value instant gratification and rapid return on investment.
In the past, many of Europe’s great cathedrals required lengthy construction periods.
The original architects and builders were almost never worshipped in the finished
product. They held a long view of their work. Can the same be said for the current
Canadian research environment? While tremendous value should be placed on carrying
out work that provides advances that are implemented in the short term for the benefit
of Canadians (e.g., Strategy for Patient Oriented Research (SPOR), research aimed
at informing clinical practice guidelines, etc.), there are some who feel that the
balance in research structure is tipping away from investigation that holds the long
view. Thus, scientists craft safer research proposals that yield predictable findings
thereby advancing their field invariably in incremental steps.
Have you heard of Janelia Research Campus? It might be the penultimate “long view”
research institution. Originally named Janelia Farm, this is a free-standing research
campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute opened in 2006 (https://www.janelia.org/).
It is decidedly atypical in its structure and its operation philosophy. It was originated
to address some of the major issues facing the traditional model of scientific research—namely
an aversion to high-risk endeavors and an inability to rapidly adapt research programs
to embrace opportunities that emerge with new discoveries [4]. Researchers at Janelia
Research Campus do not write grants, and publication in peer-reviewed journals is
not viewed as the ultimate goal (although its scientists routinely publish in very
high-impact journals). In contrast to the traditional research institute model where
groups of scientists with a wide variety of research interests are assembled and divided
into faculties, departments, and programs, the developers of Janelia Farm limited
the field to two initial areas of scientific focus. The first was the identification
of principles that govern how information is processed by neuronal circuits, using
genetic model systems in conjunction with imaging, electrophysiological, and computational
methods. The second was the development of imaging approaches and computational methods
for image analysis. For the founders of Janelia, these areas of research provided
highly focused yet challenging project themes that would benefit from “patient, generous
funding in an environment that fosters free-flowing dialogue, critique, and creative
problem solving across multiple disciplines—an environment not easily created in current
research institutions” [4]. Taken together, the goal was to assemble the best minds
in these areas, let them “live science” together on a daily basis, to not bother them
too much for a fairly long period of time, and see what they come up with. Today,
Janelia Research Campus continues to build its research legacy, yet in accordance
with its long view, its impact will be judged by future generations [5].
While radically transforming existing research structures along these lines sounds
utopic and perhaps even impractical for Canadian renal science, both the recent dialogue
about restructuring the research paradigm in the USA and the Janelia Research Campus
experiment are instructive. For example, given our limited size and capacity in Canada,
would it be useful to ask fewer research questions—to increase focus and enhance collaboration
among Canadian renal researchers? Similarly, should we identify the key strengths
of the Canadian nephrology research community and accordingly, expand the number of
integrative teams to tackle these key questions? Or, should we consider downsizing
labs and consolidating resources within existing institutions—supporting more shared
staff-scientists, and fewer students and postdocs? And lastly, in terms of engaging
with our funding agencies: we need to participate fully in the new CIHR review process
as well as that of the KFoC in order to foster and support Canadian research into
kidney health and disease.
While the Dickens quote at the beginning of this editorial may be viewed as hyperbole,
in many ways, these are indeed the best of times and the worst of times for the wider
renal research community in Canada. While opportunities remain, challenges are many,
for which we await creative solutions.