USC Researchers Reveal Only 15% of NIH AI Grants Reach Clinical Use
USC analysis of 58,746 NIH grants finds AI makes up 15.9% of the FY2025 portfolio. AI projects receive a 13.4% funding premium: $675K mean award versus $595K for non-AI work. 79% of AI grants stay in research stage; only 14.7% reach clinical deployment or implementation.
Takeaways
- USC analysis of 58,746 NIH grants finds AI makes up 15.9% of the FY2025 portfolio.
- AI projects receive a 13.4% funding premium: $675K mean award versus $595K for non-AI work.
- 79% of AI grants stay in research stage; only 14.7% reach clinical deployment or implementation.
- Cancer, aging, and mental health capture 50.1% of AI funding; health disparities gets just 5.7%.
- Two-pass GPT-4o-mini pipeline screens abstracts, then extracts structured JSON rubric fields.
- Human-in-the-loop recoding cut unclassified "Other" projects from 41.5% to 17.7%.
Two researchers at USC’s Information Sciences Institute used a large language model pipeline to classify all 58,746 NIH-funded projects listed for fiscal year 2025. Their portfolio analysis identified 9,363 projects with a substantive AI or machine learning component, then mapped their funding, disease areas, development stages, methods, and institutional collaborations. The results show where NIH-backed AI work is concentrated and how little of it has reached clinical implementation.
One in six projects uses AI
AI-related work accounted for 15.9% of the NIH projects studied. Those projects received an average award of $675,129, which was 13.4% higher than the $595,135 average for projects outside the AI classification.
| Classification | Projects | Portfolio share | Mean award |
|---|---|---|---|
| AI-related | 9,363 | 15.9% | $675,129 |
| Other projects | 49,383 | 84.1% | $595,135 |
Cancer and oncology represented the largest AI research area, followed by aging and neurodegenerative disease, mental health and substance use disorders, neuroscience, and infectious disease.
| Research area | Projects | Share of AI projects |
|---|---|---|
| Cancer and oncology | 1,814 | 19.4% |
| Aging and neurodegenerative disease | 1,572 | 16.8% |
| Mental health and substance use disorders | 1,393 | 14.9% |
| Neuroscience | 1,033 | 11.0% |
| Infectious disease | 1,024 | 10.9% |
Health disparities and minority health research received 5.7% of AI funding, despite its status as an NIH priority.
Clinical deployment gets a narrow slice
Most AI projects remained in research or development. The authors classified 7,393 projects, or 79.0%, in that stage. Clinical deployment or implementation accounted for 1,372 projects, or 14.7%.
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