A budget squeeze at the National Institutes of Health is threatening to stall biomedical research at U.S. universities, even though the federal agency hands out about $29 billion a year.

That message was delivered Tuesday by officials at Duke, Harvard, Vanderbilt, UCLA and other schools where hundreds of millions of dollars are spent each year on thousands of NIH projects. The group held a news conference in Washington, hoping to highlight the issue in the coming congressional budget debate.

The lack of any significant budget increase since 2003 is particularly relevant in the Triangle, said Ken Tindall, a senior vice president at the N.C. Biotechnology Center.

More than $700 million in NIH grants flowed to the area's three large research universities last year. Much of that money paid for salaries, equipment and other lab costs. Over time, discoveries in those labs could lead to spinoff companies or new approaches in private industry.

"The basic research made possible by these grants is what drives much of the economic development here," Tindall said.

Younger researchers with no track record are most affected by the tight budgets, said Nancy Andrews, dean of Duke University's medical school. That's because they are competing directly with researchers who are already running a lab.

"Their chances aren't good in that situation, and it's discouraging when you look at the odds," Andrews said. "Many will leave and practice medicine full time, which is fine, but others move out of the field entirely."

Kristen Newby, an associate professor of medicine at Duke, is familiar with the challenge.

"The process of getting NIH funding can be a career in and of itself," said Newby, whose research was supported by an NIH grant through 2003. Her work, which involves studying a patient's risk for heart attacks, is now paid for by the pharmaceutical industry.

Although universities aren't happy about the situation, the realities of today's federal research budget shouldn't surprise anyone, said Kei Koizumi, a budget and policy expert at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington.

Bush stems the flow

In 1998, Congress promised to double the NIH budget to $27 billion within five years. The Bush administration inherited that promise and pushed it along, but the president made it clear that there would be no further increases once the goal was met. Spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cemented his position.

Still, the number of labs and salaried lab workers grew rapidly during the five years that budget doubled. Many universities thought Congress would keep those labs running by approving budgets that at least kept up with inflation.

"No one wanted to be left behind, and it took a few years before people realized there wasn't going to be a soft landing," Koizumi said. "Now their budgets are shrinking when you take inflation into account, and they are committed to projects that typically run at least four years."

Universities turned to outside sources for money and lobbied Congress to return to historical budget increases of about 6 percent to 8 percent a year.

"That's understandable, but their time might be better spent learning to live with what they have," said Steve Ellis of Taxpayers for Common Sense in Washington. "Before we start talking about adding money, let's talk about whether we are spending each dime wisely."

NIH has made some effort to change its ways, setting aside more money for younger researchers. But those amounts aren't enough to reverse the squeeze.

New sources of money

To underscore that point, the nonprofit Howard Hughes Medical Institute announced a program Monday that will award $300 million for projects by young scientists only.

This year, a California multimillionaire announced a smaller program with a similar goal. One of the first grants went to David Kirsch, 37, a Duke researcher who wants to build a small device that can identify microscopic residue from a single cancer cell during surgery.

NIH isn't likely to fund those kind of projects these days, partly because reviewers become conservative when money is tight.

"When you can't fund as many projects, you want to increase the odds that those getting money will succeed," Andrews said. "But then you tend to see more projects being funded where you already know the answer before you start."