How Much Does Research Cost?

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Learn about the full costs of research at University Health Network.
Posted On: August 12, 2021
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The majority of medical research in Canada is conducted in research hospitals.

Sustainable funding is key to enabling world-class research, biomedical discoveries and technologies to improve health. To achieve this, research organizations must aim to cover the complete costs of research activities—this includes both direct and organizational expenses that are essential to enabling research.  

To highlight the importance of funding the full costs of research, UHN has created a short video that everyone is encouraged to watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GX0MnufQc7I. Learn about what types of costs are incurred directly by labs and scientists, as well as the types of costs incurred by the organization to support the research activity that occurs in those labs.

To ensure that we can be financially sustainable, UHN is working together with the University and Toronto and hospital members of the Toronto Academic Health Science Network (TAHSN), and with our Foundation leaders to launch a common framework to meet the full costs of research.

As part of this effort, UHN research institutes are currently holding opportunities to engage principal investigators and other research team members who help prepare grant applications and budgets about this new framework.  

The initiative is part of the UHN 2019–23 Strategic Research Plan’s “Grow research through financially sustainable structures” priority. Advancing this priority will bring greater transparency to how research finances are managed and will ensure that we invest in the future of leading high-impact research that improves the health and wellbeing of the communities we serve.