NIH Redraws Dollar-Doler Divisions

Anne MacNamara For years, when neuroscientists who study taste and smell submitted research grant proposals to the National Institutes of Health, half of the reviewers were not experts in the subspecialty. Instead, they studied language. Likewise, when language neuroscientists submitted proposals, their fates lay partly in the hands of people whose main interest in the human head started at the mouth and nose and ended in parts of the brain unrelated to language. "Historically, we had been placed with them because the National Institute [on] Deafness and Communication [Disorders] dealt with both language and chemical senses," says chemoreceptor scientist Charles Greer, professor of neurosurgery and neurobiology at Yale University School of Medicine. "We were quite distant from them ...." NIH DIPS INTO DRUG DISCOVERY RESEARCH The "NIH Roadmap," a major revamping of the way NIH funds research, is on its way with a bevy of new requests for proposals. The new approach aims to take on, as a group of institutes, projects that no one institute could tackle on its own owing to lack of resources, expertise, or infrastructure. The initiatives will cost a projected $130 million (US) in fiscal year 2004 and an estimated $2.1 billion over the next five years. The funds will be siphoned from the budgets of each of the 27 NIH institutes and centers, rather than be paid for with new funding. The roadmap includes 28 initiatives relating to three broad themes: New Pathways to Discovery A plan to produce tools to target diseases and hasten improvements in human health. The initiatives will focus on molecular libraries and molecular imaging, bioinformatics and computational biology, nanomedicine, and structural biology. Research Teams of the Future Involves high-risk research, interdisciplinary research, and public-private partnerships. The intent is to engage diverse specialists in tackling complex biological problems and spawning unexpected insights. Reengineering the Clinical Research Enterprise The roadmap seeks, in part, to harmonize clinical research regulatory requirements, integrate clinical research networks, develop technologies to improve the assessment of clinical outcomes, and offer better training for clinicians. --Eugene Russo Such boundaries are finally changing because of an aggressive NIH reorganization plan launched in 1997. The first redesigned sections, in the hematology integrated review groups (IRGs), met in June. All new IRGs are scheduled to meet by February 2005. Now, when research-ers submit proposals, they can expect an initial response from NIH within about 50 days, often much sooner. A computer-generated letter will disclose the study section that will review their proposals and the NIH institute or center to which the Center for Scientific Review (CSR) will then send the proposal. CONVENIENCE CONGREGATIONS Traditionally, the boundaries among many other NIH study sections had not been drawn for optimal subspecialty separation. The "number [of sections] grew and grew and grew, but mostly in response to the workload," with overworked sections simply dividing into two, says Brent Stanfield, acting CSR director. Moreover, new fields of study sprang up for which no separate study sections were ever created. By 1996 problems like these prompted an unprecedented mission: to reorganize all the scientific boundaries among the nearly 150 study sections, while still reviewing the 38,000-plus grant proposals submitted that year, a number that rose past 64,000 last year. "The truth is there has never been a systematic evaluation of whether or not we have the right study sections for today's science," says Ellie Ehrenfeld, who was appointed in 1996 as agency director to lead the project and who resigned in September of this year. It's too soon to judge the success of the reorganization, though it is possible to assess the much smaller 1996-1998 redesign of the neuroscience IRG. That effort became necessary when Congress reassigned all Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Administration research to NIH. Although the chemoreceptor scientists are glad to be separated from language scientists, now they're paired with pain re-searchers, more similar to them but still not a perfect match. Some of them want a new chemoreceptor-only section. To handle such complaints, the reorganization mandates that all IRG boundaries be re-viewed every five years. "I feel like we're in much better shape now than we used to be," Ehrenfeld says, "simply because people believe we're going to listen, so they come and talk to us." John Dudley Miller (johnmiller@nasw.org) is a freelance writer in Cleveland. function sendData() { document.frm.pathName.value = location.pathname; result = false if (document.frm.score[0].checked) result = true; if (document.frm.score[1].checked) result = true; if (document.frm.score[2].checked) result = true; if (document.frm.score[3].checked) result = true; if (document.frm.score[4].checked) result = true; if (!result) alert("Please select") return result; } .myradio{background-color : #94bee5} Please indicate on a 1 - 5 scale how strongly you would recommend this article to your colleagues? Not recommended 1 2 3 4 5 Highly recommended Please register your vote

NIH Redraws Dollar-Doler Divisions

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