How is diabetes research money spent?
Most diabetes research in Canada is funded by grants from public (e.g., MRC) and private (e.g., Canadian Diabetes Association) funding organizations and from pharmaceutical companies. Grants may support individual laboratories or groups of scientists working in a common area and pooling their knowledge. Money may be directed to support laboratory supplies and technicians’ salaries or the salaries of diabetes scientists, enabling them to devote their time to diabetes research. Each granting agency has its own specifics on funding coverage. Scientists write grant applications, which are reviewed by their peers who have expertise in the field. The competition for limited resources stimulates ideas and can serve to improve the overall quality of research. On the negative side, however, more and more time is required to write and review grant proposals, which generally must be renewed every one to three years. Unfortunately, there are a lot of good ideas that can never be tested because of
