Medical grants a boon for Mass.

Only Calif. received more NIH funding

Massachusetts biomedical researchers are seeing a windfall from federal stimulus money, with the state receiving more in grants from the National Institutes of Health than all others but California.

With $178 million in extra federal funds already directed toward Massachusetts, research projects that had been dormant are being revived and others are accelerating.

By midweek, 660 new grants had been sprinkled across the state’s hospitals and university laboratories as part of the Obama administration’s campaign to kick-start a sputtering economy. More money is coming in daily, and researchers say they have begun hiring junior scientists and technicians and buying new equipment.

Massachusetts lags behind more populated states in overall stimulus funding, but scientists here are receiving a disproportionate share of the $10 billion the NIH plans to distribute. California has received 927 grants totaling $244 million, according to the Globe’s analysis of NIH data on funds awarded through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

The volume of NIH stimulus funding reflects the region’s high concentration of research centers and its longstanding dominance in winning federal grants. The agency included geography as one of its criteria in distributing money, but said states with large research centers would get a higher share. The numbers are preliminary, and more grants are expected to be awarded between now and the end of the month.

While the stimulus funds are dwarfed by what Massachusetts researchers get annually from the NIH - $2.25 billion last year - federal funding for biomedical research has been flat for most of this decade, so the new money is having a significant effect at research universities, teaching hospitals, and private labs.

Margaret Livingstone, a neurobiology professor at Harvard Medical School, said she had been scaling back over the past year and a half, eliminating a full-time technician’s job and spending much of her time writing grants to support her lab.

Through the stimulus funding, however, Livingstone received $390,000 for the first year of a two-year grant that will examine how brain cells react to optical illusions. Eventually, she hopes the work will reveal some of the basics of how vision works. In the short term, she is hiring two postdoctoral researchers.

“I was cutting back on the amount of research going on, and now I’m going back to full speed,’’ Livingstone said.

Like bridge and road projects that add to the employment ranks now but also establish transportation corridors with a longer-term economic effect, funding for scientific research is aimed not only at job creation, but at planting the seeds of innovation that will improve human health and put more people to work in the years ahead, when research may yield commercial applications and products.

For example, some time this month, a truck will pull up to a loading dock at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and deliver human lung tissue samples packed in dry ice. It’s part of work involving three pulmonary disease research grants from the NIH totaling about $1 million.

Brigham and Women’s researchers in the lab of Dr. Augustine M.K. Choi, chief of pulmonary and critical care medicine, will use the tissue and grant money to experiment with a new technique - combining imaging and molecular targeting - to pinpoint causes of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD, a lung disease that is the fourth leading killer in the United States. Much of the funding will be used to buy medical supplies, cover part of the salaries of researchers already on the payroll, and allow for trips to conferences to present findings.

“The whole idea is to generate data and apply for bigger grants,’’ said Choi. That could lead to new ways of dealing with COPD.

But betting on innovation is risky, and it can take years for benefits to trickle into the economy. A recent article in the journal Science pointed out that the biotechnology industry was based on scientific advances from the 1950s, while the Internet revolution of the 1990s was the realization of investments made in the 1970s and 1980s.

“We perfectly well understand that this is, as the name suggests, a recovery and reinvestment act - the recovery is what happens right now and investments are the investments in research and development, where you expect a benefit ultimately down the road,’’ White House science adviser John P. Holdren said earlier this summer. “It’s not particularly bothersome that there’s a big lag there; we understand it takes time for research to impact the economy positively.’’

Still, the immediate effect of the stimulus is beginning to play out in local labs, and scientists are finding themselves facing a new, entirely welcome kind of pressure.

“The challenge is, the money comes in and you’re under the gun,’’ said Dr. Richard Bringhurst, senior vice president of medicine and research management at Massachusetts General Hospital. “To hire new staff, to get the work under way . . . it can be hard to recruit them quickly, there’s a timing challenge that’s imposed disproportionately with these short-term grants.’’

Typical NIH grants are for three to five years, but the stimulus money is for shorter periods.

And researchers at the Boston Retinal Implant Project - a joint effort between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Boston VA Medical Center, and Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary - also are moving at a faster pace thanks to stimulus funding. They had been planning to scale back efforts to create a prosthetic device that could be implanted into the eye to help people blinded by specific diseases see. But a $2.3 million two-year grant will help them build an implant that could be tested in clinical trials.

“We are hiring a circuit designer, outsourcing a lot of the mechanical assembly to vendors, and then we have some subcontracts to other universities that’s going to help support some graduate students,’’ said Shawn Kelly, electrical engineering project manager.

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