Government money has a unique property: it has an expiration date. You have to spend the money or it will be taken away. That’s why you see some researchers spend their remaining funding in a rush.
This obviously gives many biotech companies an opportunity to sell their products. Then a relevant question is, how many grants and how much money will expire in each month of 2014?
To address this question, we compiled 52,602 NIH grants which were already awarded but will expire in 2014. We also compiled 218,803 grants which expired between 2010 and 2013 to see if there is a pattern over the years.
As seen in the figure below, on average 4,300 grants will expire every month in 2014. In January and February, 6,800 grants will expire; then the number ramps up and peaks in June before it drops. This pattern repeats itself in the past few years.
Number of expiring grants
The same pattern is also found in the total funding size.
Total expiring NIH funding
So are you going to do more marketing for June?
Lesson Learned:
- On average ~4,300 grants will expire in each month in 2014.
- The number of expiring grants peaks in June.
PS: If you want to understand research trend (e.g. how much money NIH awards to stem cell research in the past 18 months? who received stem cell grants last month?), we can do the analysis for you. Contact Us