VA Research Foundations are not new, the authorizing regulations have been
in place for about 5 or 6 years (maybe longer).  Although I'm not positive
on this issue, my recollection is that they were put into place in order to
allow the hospitals to accept grants and keep the overhead.  Prior to this
mechanism, the hospitals had to return overhead to VA Central Office, hence
the reason why most hospitals have chosen to submit grants through their
affiliated medical schools.  Not all VA hospitals have chosen to go this
route.  In CT  we used to have two VAs, one which developed the research
foundation (this one happened to be affiliated with UCONN) and one which did
not (the one affiliated with Yale).  Now the VA has consolidated operations
in CT, and we have only one VA with two campuses, and I believe that the
research foundation has been allowed to become defunct.

In many cases, the affiliated medical school has gone along with the
development of the research foundations, in order to provide for an orderly
administration and management of some types of research funding, e.g.,
clinical trials where the indemnification had to be of the federal
government.  In those instances the medical school has negotiated positions
on the board of directors of the research foundation.  I believe that
Northwestern University's VA's research foundation is an example of this.
 There are some other examples of big VAs which have been doing this for
quite some time, but my memory fails me on where they are.  Seattle maybe?
 St. Louis?

In the limited interactions I had with our VA's foundation, I found that the
strategy was entirely to attempt to skim indirect costs away from the
University.  The VA's R&D management at the time did not want to go through
the trouble of putting a complete research infrastructure into place in
order to be able to administer federal grants (hence they generously allowed
the University to continue to administer those, and continue to assume the
regulatory burden (NRC, USDA, PHS, OSHA, EPA, DHHS) and cost associated with
administering those awards), but informed us that they intended to submit
and accept grants to private agencies such as AHA, ACS, etc.  In the end,
our VA only accepted one grant from a voluntary health agency.  For reasons
never explained to me, they quit pressuring our "joint" faculty to submit
grants through the foundation, and then after that ACOS for Research left,
there was never any further mention of the VA research foundation.  Now its
a moot question because of the reorganization in CT.

I suggest that you ask your medical dean to contact the ACOS for Research at
your VA to find out what is going on.  If they are serious about setting up
an independent operation, then they should be serious about developing an
infrastructure to support the research.  The University should have
representation on the board of the foundation in order to be sure that the
university's interests and assets are not abused.  After all, there are
joint appointments involved here, those faculty are employees of both
institutions and subject to institutional affiliation agreements.

Len Paplauskas
Asst. VP for Research
UCONN Health Center
Farmington, CT   06030-5355
 ----------
From: Research Administration Discuss
To: Multiple recipients of list RES
Subject: VA Medical Research Foundations
Date: Monday, December 09, 1996 11:26AM

I recently spoke with a faculty member who has his primary appointment  in
our
 VA affiliate, and a secondary appointment in our academic school of
medicine.  He told me he had just received a call announcing he was granted
an American Heart Association nat'l grant-in-aid; he needed some
administrative information from me (fringes, idc rates, policies,etc.) to
determine if he was going to route the award through my institution.  His
project involves human subjects and animal research.

Since we had never reviewed a grant application from him, I asked him how
this
was possible.

He explained that 'due to political reasons' he was asked to submit the
application through his recently formed VA Medical Research Foundation.   He
said   that due to budgetary cutbacks, research foundations are being
 formed in most of the academic affiliated VAs across the country;  they
administer small drug company awards and gift/development funds.  AHA awards
though are subject to many of the same strict requirements that the
NIH/federal awards have.  The VA faculty member also explained that the VA
foundation has not yet administered any payroll, and he didn't know if this
was going to be a problem        .

Are others aware of "VA Research Foundations" being formed across the
country? Since this is the first I've heard of this, I thought I'd bring it
to the
attention of the list.  Any commentary/information would be appreciated.

Thank you,
Kathleen
xxxxxx@smtplink.mssm.edu