A good return for your money?
The grant awarding process

Those who generously donate to the Arthritis Research Campaign should reasonably expect that every pound given will be carefully and wisely spent on achieving the Charity's aims.

How the decisions about research spending are made is something of a mystery to many of our supporters, and what follows is an attempt to explain how our grant-giving system works.

During the year, we receive about 400 grant applications; if all were supported it would cost around £60 million – about 5 times the budget available! In a typical year we might award 100 to 150 grants. How are these grants selected, and are they the right ones?

These decisions are made by a number of specialist committees with a membership composed of some of the most highly respected clinicians and scientists in the country. All of them give unstintingly of their time while claiming no fees for the countless hours of service during their four-year term of office.

The largest budget is controlled by the Research Sub-Committee which meets three times a year, on each occasion spending a day and a half considering around 80 applications for project and equipment grants. Because of the wide range of research it funds, the Research Sub-Committee has members with expertise in clinical areas such as rheumatology, orthopaedic surgery, clinical trials and physiotherapy and scientific fields such biochemistry, immunology, genetics, molecular biology, epidemiology, genetics and bio-engineering.

There are separate committees, similarly composed, who award fellowships, programmes, multi-centre clinical trials, academic posts and educational grants.  All of these committees work to the same principle of competitive peer review (see below) to help them reach decisions on which applications to fund. 

Grant applications outline in very great detail the theory or hypothesis to be put to the test, the scientific experiments which will be carried out, how the data or other information will be collected, and the methods of analysis to be used for the results. 

Every application is first sent to four or five external experts, often from outside the UK, who look closely at every aspect, homing in on possible weaknesses and providing a recommendation for funding. The committee then discusses every application in detail, putting forward their own views to add to those of the external experts. Only about one application in four survives this rigorous scrutiny.

At the end of the day, two major factors determine the success or failure of an application: scientific excellence and relevance to understanding the cause of arthritis, coupled with the hope of eventually leading to a better treatment for patients and, in the long term, a cure for one of the many rheumatic diseases.

It is this pursuit of quality and value for money which has created the high regard in which the Arthritis Research Campaign is held within the medical and scientific research communities world-wide.