The “Valley of Death” refers to the stage of biomedical/pharma product development between basic research and commercialization. It is a notoriously difficult space in which to try and obtain the funding needed to push a product towards profitability. Well, biotech startups move over. There is a new Valley of Death in town.

At the NNB pub night tonight I spoke to a new faculty member from a Boston area academic research institution. He told me an unfortunately now familiar tale of how he is trying to do his research using small foundation grants because he can’t get a big one from the NIH. Small private grants are great but they don’t exactly make you a hero in the department. This is because while they might pay for quite a few tips and tubes, they almost never offer a reasonable overhead or indirect cost recovery rate.

For every dollar an investigator wins in direct NIH funding, the institution gets a certain amount on top of that, say 50 cents or so. Each institution negotiates their own rate with the federal government and these rates can vary between institutions due to intrinsic differences like real estate values, support salaries based on cost of living, and things like that. With private grants that do not offer the same indirect recovery rate as the NIH (most offer nothing or 5-10% at best), you might be paying for all your own reagents but you are not paying your share for the bench space you have, the light shining down on it, or the salary of who sweeps the floor around it relative to someone with the same amount of grant support from the NIH. Dig? Here’s where the Valley of Death comes in…

We’ve all heard the buzz about how hard it is to get a first, independent grant like an RO1. The chances are dismal, but just HOW BAD is it? The NIH tells us that the average age for a new investigator to receive a first RO1 has risen “to 42 (years of age) for PhD degree holders and 44 for MD and MD/PhD degree holders”. As my new friend told me, if you get hired on as an Assistant Professor, and get a three year startup package, based on the ages of most new faculty at hiring that money is going to be long gone by the time they have a chance to get independent funding. This is the new Valley of Death in academia and it’s wide and dry. If anything like its cousin in biotech and pharma, it’s going to be the stopping point for a lot of science.