The National Institutes of Health Lasker Clinical Research Scholars Program: A Decade of Launching Clinician-Scientist Careers.

Abstract

In response to the decades-long decrease in U.S. clinician-scientists, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation launched the Lasker Clinical Research Scholars Program in academic year 2011 to 2012. The investigators examined the early outcomes of this program. Thirty-nine scholars have matriculated into the program as of May 2023. Productivity was assessed for all scholars who joined the program before October 2020 (n = 31). Extramural early-stage investigators (ESIs) were used as a control group, and coarsened exact matching was used to compare the groups. The scholars were compared with the matched ESIs on 4 productivity metrics: publication count, weighted relative citation ratio, clinical impact, and approximate potential to translate. Publication records for both groups were compiled using the NIH Office of Portfolio Analysis' name disambiguation method and manually curated to ensure integrity of the data set. Of the 39 scholars, 29 were compared with 121 matched extramural ESIs. Five years before matriculation, the 2 groups had comparable numbers of publications, but scholars had a higher median weighted relative citation ratio, clinical impact, and approximate potential to translate score. Five years after matriculation, the scholars had a higher median number of publications than the ESIs, and the gap between scholars and ESIs, with scholars having higher scores, had widened for all metrics except approximate potential to translate scores. Of 10 of the 39 scholars at or approaching tenure eligibility, 6 have attained tenure (3 at NIH and 3 in academic institutions), and 4 are on track to attain tenure at NIH. All the Lasker clinical research scholars are substantially involved in clinical and translational research. Their productivity matches or exceeds that of a matched cohort of ESIs at U.S. academic institutions.