Funding Large Studies Posted on December 3, 2007 Michael E. Thase (bio) offers tips on getting involved in multi-center trials.

There are several challenges facing treatment researchers, and one current challenge is that for an investigator-initiated project, it cannot be larger than $500,000 a year, direct cost, without the collaboration and explicit sign-on from the National Institute of Mental Health program.

So if your research aim involves both a short-term study as well as a follow-up study, you generally can’t do both within those budgetary restrictions. So typically that means having two awards. Now, if your question involves anything large, of great public health significance, then typically that means you’ll need to do a multi-center study, and the multi-center study is what the U mechanism is covering.

Generally, you can’t take the lead on a treatment research project until you’ve had the opportunity to work in collaboration with someone with a greater level of experience and involvement in designing and conducting these large-scale studies. So typically, one’s first grant is relatively small, because it gives you the opportunity in a more manageable way to focus more narrowly on a single specific question.

Typically, when we’re doing these larger, multi-center, NIMH-funded studies, investigators at an entry level, or early in their career, work in collaboration with more senior investigators. Now, once a study is ready to go very, very prime time — so, for example, 50, 60, 70 sites — it could be possible that someone who is still relatively junior in their career could run such a single, smaller site in a very large project.

But I think the best way to become involved in these multi-center trials is to work with people who have already been involved in these multi-center trials, and in the course of developing your own research aims you participate as a co-investigator. Usually along the way in that project you can identify your own question out of the work that’s being done, and be able to take the lead and make use of the data collected by the whole group, which is an opportunity that a junior investigator would never have working independently. Access to the data from 400, 500, 600 people, or in the case of Star D, more than 2,800 people at the entry level of treatment.

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