The Whitaker Foundation: 2002 Annual Report -- Mission

Careers Awards:
BME Research Grants

A Retrospective: 1976
A Retrospective: 1985
A Retrospective: 1986
A Retrospective: 1991

The Whitaker Foundation closed the year by accepting final applications in its oldest and largest program, the Biomedical Engineering Research Grants Program. The last round of awards will be announced in July 2003.

These awards began in 1976, the year after the foundation was created. The program was modeled after the philanthropic interests of U.A. Whitaker, who during his lifetime actively encouraged engineers, scientists, and physicians to join in solving problems in medicine and biology. He made a number of personal gifts to support this type of collaboration among institutions in the Boston area.

In setting up the foundation, Whitaker did not mandate a particular mission but called upon the foundation to operate “exclusively for charitable, scientific, literary or educational purposes.” He suggested that the organization accomplish its goal and distribute all of its assets within 40 years.

The Whitaker Foundation began by continuing two philanthropic programs begun by Whitaker himself. One supported human service and education in the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, region. The other stimulated collaborative medical research in and around Boston.

In the 1970s, biomedical engineering was still relatively young, composed largely of cross-disciplinary collaborations between researchers in the engineering school, medical school, and the departments of biology and other life sciences. There were relatively few formal biomedical engineering departments and few biomedical engineers acting as grant reviewers for major funding organizations.

During this time, there was a perception that young biomedical engineers were at a disadvantage when competing for research support from the two largest government funding agencies, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF). NIH reviewers often saw biomedical engineering proposals as having too much science and engineering to qualify for NIH support, while NSF decision-makers viewed the same proposals as being too medically oriented.

The Foundation Governing Committee recognized this as an opportunity to expand Whitaker’s philanthropic interests to fill an unmet need in the research community.

They established the Biomedical Engineering Research Grants Program, which offered three-year awards that enabled many young investigators for the first time to conduct research combining engineering and the life sciences. The program grew to make about 100 new awards annually.

Since its inception, the foundation has defined biomedical engineering in its broadest terms:The application of engineering to solve problems in medicine and the basic life sciences. This view has defined the scope of the grants program and given it direction, attracting proposals from a broad range of academic disciplines.

Early on, principal investigators came from such diverse departments as electrical and computer engineering, radiology, surgery, mechanical engineering, physics and chemistry.

Much of the research was device-oriented. Toward the middle of the 1990s, the program continued to support a wide variety of research, but medical imaging had emerged as one of the most supported areas of investigation.

Recent awards have concentrated in molecular and cellular studies, including tissue engineering.

The Research Grants Program evolved over the years into a career-development initiative that supplied young biomedical engineers with the resources to begin a laboratory and use research results to win additional funding from major government and private research sponsors in order to advance their careers. Research grant applications were reviewed not only for their ideas but for their promise that the principal investigator would become established in the field and go on to a productive career in biomedical engineering. As one way of assessing the impact of the program, the foundation surveyed 1,220 current and former Whitaker investigators in 2002, delivering separate questionnaires to those in academic, corporate, and other employment sectors.

A total of 614 investigators responded, 585 from academia, 15 from industry, and 14 from the government and other sectors.

Of the 585 response from investigators in academia, 69 percent said they were still pursuing research based on their original Whitaker grant. Sixty-one percent had received research support from NIH and 34 percent had received grants from NSF.

These numbers are significant in light of the program’s goal to prepare young investigators to compete successfully for support, particularly from these two agencies.

More than 200 investigators said they had received support from three or more of the following: NIH, NSF, the Department of Defense and other government sources, private foundations, and industry. When the foundation began in the 1970s, there was little representation for biomedical engineering on NIH grant-review panels.

Even into the early 1990s, there was little evidence of biomedical engineers, especially those from biomedical engineering departments, among NIH grant reviewers.

A decade later, conditions had changed. The foundation’s investigator survey showed that 53 percent of respondents had served on an NIH review panel, and 43 percent had served in that capacity for the NSF. Fifty-six investigators said they had served on four or more review panels for the following organizations: NIH, NSF, the Department of Defense and other government agencies, private foundations, and industry.

Principal investigators on Whitaker research grants are expected to set out specific goals and then make annual reports of progress toward those goals as a requirement for continued funding. Progress is defined, in part, by publication of research results in peer-reviewed journals. Whitaker investigators have been highly productive in this regard but have gone much further.

Whitaker investigators have created more than 250 new products and devices and launched more than 100 companies to commercialize the results of their research, according to the survey.

Among the medical products brought to market are the heart assist pump, which has kept hundreds of patients alive while waiting for a heart transplant, and the implantable heart defibrillator, which jolts irregular heartbeats back into a normal rhythm, keeping thousands of cardiac patients alive and healthy.

Whitaker investigators have invented new surgical instruments and techniques, new imaging technologies and applications of those technologies, new diagnostic tests, drug delivery devices, and scores of other implements for improving human health.

They have developed new methods for growing human tissues, such as cartilage and bone, developed gene therapies, created new approaches to growing nerve cells for transplant, developed sophisticated computer models for predicting disease severity, and made other advances in cellular and tissue engineering.

Twenty-six investigators reported having been responsible for all of the following: a new product, device, patent, license, and company start-up.

A majority of investigators in academia hold an appointment in a biomedical engineering program or department, 37 percent with a primary appointment and 23 percent a secondary appointment. This fulfills the program goal of launching productive research careers in biomedical engineering.

Whitaker investigators have supported more than 13,000 biomedical engineering students from all educational levels. Most investigators said they consult with industry, at least occasionally.

Among the 15 investigators who reported having taken corporate jobs, most had continued the line of work they began under their Whitaker award. A majority of them had been employed in the commercial sector for an average of 4. 5 years, had developed a product or device, and had served on NIH review panels.

Another measure of success for the Research Grants Program lies in the number of prominent academic leaders in biomedical engineering who began their careers with Whitaker funding.

Forty former Whitaker investigators now chair an academic department and 60 are in charge of a university program, either in biomedical engineering or another discipline.

Over its lifespan, the Research Grants Program has invested more than $260 million in the careers of young biomedical engineering investigators and their research to improve human health.

The Research Grants Program’s first award in 1976 enabled William Pierce, M.D., of Pennsylvania State University to conduct research on the ventricular assist device, a mechanical pump he used to wean postoperative patients off the heart-lung machine. In 2002 the federal government approved the heart assist pump as a permanent implant for patients with severe heart failure, making it available to tens of thousands of Americans who are terminally ill but do not qualify for a heart transplant.

“The Research Grants Program is a wonderful thing,” says Pierce, now the Evan Pugh Emeritus Professor of Surgery at Penn State.

“The stimulus that it’s provided is just tremendous.”