Category: Director’s Messages

As I noted in my previous post, we are actively working to make Recovery Act awards. Below is a plot of the cumulative investment of NIGMS Recovery Act funds as a function of the award start date. This includes awards made through the middle of August.

As you can see, the rate at which we are making awards is accelerating. Many more awards are in process. Our advisory council will review Challenge Grant, GO Grant, and Faculty Recruitment (P30) applications in mid-September, and we plan to make awards by the end of that month.

Yesterday, we posted a request for stories on the impact of Recovery Act funding. Comments to this post revealed some areas of frustration and misunderstanding that I would like to address.

First, I’d like to say that one of the big Recovery Act stories is the scientific community’s huge response with exciting ideas. Indeed, we’ve received many more proposals—including requests for administrative supplements—than we can fund, even at the high level of the Recovery Act allocation. We know how much effort is involved in preparing applications, and we’re deeply grateful to the large number of scientists who have agreed to help review these proposals.

At any time, you can use the NIH RePORTER site to view Recovery Act projects funded by NIGMS and other components of NIH.

To date, we have awarded approximately $50 million of the $500 million allocated to NIGMS over the two-year period of the Recovery Act. Of these, approximately 130 are supplements to ongoing R01s, 40 are two-year R01s, and 60 are supplements to other award types. Many more awards are in progress!

Just as it has been new for you, much of the process related to the Recovery Act has been new to NIH. Since the Recovery Act was passed, NIH staff has been working hard to develop and implement systems that allow decisions and awards to be made quickly while maintaining the standards of fairness, accountability, and rigor that the scientific community and taxpayers rightfully expect.

Since this is an NIH-wide and, indeed, a government-wide effort, these processes are extensive. After a recommendation is made and approved to fund a particular award at the NIGMS level, our grants management staff must prepare the award, working with your sponsored research offices to determine the precise amount of the award and to make sure that any outstanding issues are resolved. Some awards can be processed more quickly than others. Then, award recommendations are consolidated at the NIH level and processed further. While we have made considerable efforts in streamlining these steps (and, as noted above, many awards are now working their way through this process), it still takes time, and we are not able to provide much information to applicants until the process is complete.

The bottom line is that we are working as hard as we can to get these awards out, in addition to the awards we make with our regular appropriation. If you have not heard anything, it does not mean that your Recovery Act application will not be funded! We will let you know any definitive information—positive or negative—as soon as we can.

Also, no awards have been made for any of the trans-NIH initiatives such as the Challenge Grants, GO grants and P30 Faculty Start-Up grants. The Challenge Grants have recently been reviewed and scored. NIH, through the Office of the Director, had committed to funding 200 Challenge Grants. Many institutes and centers have set aside funds to support additional Challenge Grants. My best guesstimate is that something like 600 Challenge Grants will be funded NIH-wide. The review processes are still under way for the GO grants and P30 Start-Up grants. None of these awards will be made until close to the end of the fiscal year (September 30), as these applications must all go through review by the advisory councils.

I hope that this helps clarify some of the major points of concern. Please let me know if you have additional questions.

We know you’re eagerly awaiting Recovery Act funding decisions and curious about how we plan to distribute these funds. Although we still don’t have all the information we need to make firm allocations, I can provide the following snapshot of what we’re currently projecting.

About three-quarters of NIH’s Recovery Act appropriation was distributed to the institutes and centers, which have considerable flexibility in how they invest these funds. Our strategy at NIGMS is a diversified one, as shown in the figure below.

Estimated Distribution of NIGMS Recovery Act Funds

Applications in the first five categories (blue) were submitted and reviewed prior to the Recovery Act. The next three categories (red) are Recovery Act programs that solicited new applications, which are now being reviewed. The final category (black) includes supplements to research centers, research management and support and some other programs.

Some institutes that had very low R01 success rates are using nearly all of their Recovery Act funds for two-year grants to support previously submitted and reviewed applications for R01s and other grants. NIGMS has maintained a higher success rate, in part by making relatively large administrative budget adjustments to funded grants. We know that this approach can make it difficult to achieve some grant aims in a timely manner. The Recovery Act offers an opportunity to accelerate the pace of this previously peer-reviewed and funded research while creating jobs and stimulating the economy.

Because our success rate is higher than those of most other institutes, we are making a relatively large number of Recovery Act awards for administrative supplements and revisions. The next largest category, two-year research project grants, will support exciting proposals that we were not able to fund with our regular appropriations.

We are not making awards in a formulaic manner, but rather on a case-by-case basis. For two-year grants, each applicant can renegotiate specific aims as appropriate.

We are working to award Recovery Act funds as quickly as possible to benefit the economy and drive scientific progress. Applications for the GO, Challenge and faculty start-up P30 grants are now in, and peer review is under way. Once this review is complete, we will make funding decisions consistent with the areas of interest we stated in the funding announcements.

But even applications that were previously peer reviewed must go through additional steps before we finalize each award.

To help the American public see the distribution of Recovery Act funds in their communities, NIH recently launched a beta version of a Recovery Act funding map. You may be particularly interested in the option to list all grants at an institution, available by clicking on a state in the drop-down list or the table below the U.S. map.

As we move ahead in making these awards, we are also looking forward to tracking the impact of the funding on stimulating the economy, creating and retaining jobs, and producing exciting new results. We look forward to hearing from you about these outcomes and will be providing additional mechanisms to make this easy for you to do.

NIH’s draft guidelines for human stem cell research (link no longer available) are now published in the Federal Register for public comment (link no longer available) within the next 30 days. I encourage you to read them and submit your comments.

Here are a few key points about the draft guidelines:

• They allow NIH funding for research using human embryonic stem cells derived from embryos created by in vitro fertilization (IVF) for reproductive purposes and no longer needed for that purpose.
• They describe the conditions and informed consent procedures required during the derivation of human embryonic stem cells used for NIH-supported research.
• They support continued research using adult stem cells and induced pluripotent stem cells.
• They do NOT allow NIH funding for research using human embryonic stem cells derived from other sources, including somatic cell nuclear transfer, parthenogenesis and/or IVF embryos created for research purposes.

If you currently have a grant, have a pending competing grant application, have an application for an administrative supplement, or are planning to submit an application involving human stem cells, you should read NIH Guide NOT-OD-09-085. It describes the status of ongoing research using human stem cells and how NIH will handle stem cell applications—including those in response to Recovery Act funding announcements—while the guidelines are being finalized.

Use the “Post a Comment” or e-mail links above to send me your questions about these grant policies.

Welcome to the new Feedback Loop site, the place to get NIGMS news as it happens.

For this first post, I want to update you on NIH and NIGMS Recovery Act funding plans and opportunities. If you have questions about administrative supplements, revisions or two-year R01s, you should read the FAQs we just posted on the NIGMS Recovery Act Web site.

We want this resource to be as useful as possible, so I encourage you to let us know if you have questions that aren’t answered in our FAQs or in the NIH FAQs we link to. One way to do this is by submitting a comment to this post.

Also be sure to visit our updated NIGMS Recovery Act guidance document. It includes information on three recent NIH notices:

• Funding considerations for applications with meritorious scores that fall beyond the payline
• Programmatic limitations and use of modular budgets in relation to supplement and revision requests
• Specific business processes for Recovery Act funding

We plan to make new Feedback Loop posts about once a week and focus on one or a few topics each time, so you can quickly get the information you need. We’ll also organize previous posts by topic so you can easily find them.

If you would like to get new content automatically, you can sign up to receive it by e-mail or RSS feed. Of course, you can change your subscription options at any time.

Please tell your colleagues about the site and encourage them to subscribe, as well.