Dear Falconet,

Please forgive my late response. I've been very busy, and that's a difficult question to answer. Since I do not yet run my own lab, the exact costs of doing research are new to me.

The simplest answer is that the more funding that we can get, the more research that we can perform, and the quicker that we can perform it. Since we do research at a university, the "indirect expenses" (overhead charged by the university) also have to be taken into account. At Rutgers, the indirect expenses = around 60%. That is, if we receive a $100,000 grant from the NIH (in "direct expenses" of the research), then the actual cost for the NIH = $160,000 = $100,000 for the lab + $60,000 for the university. At many other research institutions, the indirect expenses are an even larger %.

The following numbers refer to the "direct expenses" only (and I am not yet an expert in the detailed budgets of running a lab):
If we got a few thousand dollars, we could use it to purchase compounds for testing. If we got several tens of thousands of dollars, then we could use it to purchase compounds and help pay for the reagents and the costs for running the biological assays (that is, tests against an enzyme from the pathogen, tests against the whole-cell, live pathogen, toxicity tests against model mammalian cells, and perhaps some metabolic stability tests in mouse liver microsomes for the top few compounds). If we received one to two hundred thousand dollars, then we could devote the full-time efforts of a postdoctoral fellow or two to the project, purchase some compounds, and help pay for some of the reagents and the costs for running the aforementioned biological assays. If we received a million dollars, then we could devote the full-time effort of several Ph.D.-level personnel, pay the salary of the Professor who runs the lab, purchase compounds, perhaps purchase some more advanced equipment to expedite things, and pay for the costs of running the aforementioned biological assays (and perhaps some additional solubility tests and even some in vivo experiments in mouse models of the disease, for the very best compounds discovered).

If there are any research Professors reading this who can correct my estimates, then please chime in with your expertise.

Happy New Year to you and to all fellow crunchers!!

Best wishes,
Dr. Alex L. Perryman