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Now Seeking Applications for Next Year’s “Pioneers” and “New Innovators”

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NIH Director’s Pioneer AwardNIH has announced the 2010 competitions for the NIH Director’s Pioneer Awards and the NIH Director’s New Innovator Awards. These awards support exceptionally creative scientists who propose highly innovative—and often unconventional—approaches to major challenges in biomedical or behavioral research. Both programs are part of the NIH Roadmap for Medical Research and are managed by NIGMS.

The Pioneer Award provides $2.5 million in direct costs over five years and is open to scientists at U.S. institutions at any career level. The deadline for applying is October 20, 2009.

NIH Director’s New Innovator AwardThe New Innovator Award provides $1.5 million in direct costs over five years and is designed for early stage investigators at U.S. institutions who have not yet obtained an NIH R01 or similar grant. Applications are due by October 27, 2009.

For more information about the programs and links to the requests for applications, see the Pioneer Award Web site and the New Innovator Award Web site.

One of the features of these programs that I find most exciting is the annual symposium. This year’s symposium will take place on the NIH campus in Bethesda on September 24 and 25 and will include research talks by the first graduating class of Pioneer Award recipients and by the class of 2008. The 2009 award recipients will also be announced. The symposium will be videocast live and archived at http://videocast.nih.gov.

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Important Updates about the PSI:Biology Funding Opportunities

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PSI:BiologySince my last post about PSI:Biology, I’ve received lots of questions about the initiative and the new funding opportunities. To answer these questions more broadly and encourage more applicants, we’re hosting a live videocast briefing on Monday, August 31, from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. EDT. You’ll hear from Jeremy Berg, Cathy Lewis and myself.

Participants will have the chance to ask questions, make comments, get input on possible research projects and identify potential collaborators. You can use the live event feedback form on the videocast page, or you can send your questions in advance by e-mailing me or posting a comment here. If you would like to remain anonymous, please be sure to let us know so we don’t share your name during the briefing.

Screenshot of NIH Videocasting and Podcasting Web site

To watch the live event, go to http://videocast.nih.gov next Monday and look for “PSI: Biology VideoCast Briefing” in the “Today’s Events” section. Later, you’ll be able to find the archived version of the briefing on the past events page.

A number of you have wondered if NIGMS can help you identify other researchers with whom you might collaborate to develop an application to establish one of the PSI:Biology partnerships. In response, we’ve established a Web form that will allow you to enter your name and contact information and a brief description of the research area for which you would like to apply. Participation is entirely up to you and is not a requirement for application. The form and the public page with submissions will be posted until the application deadline.

This brings me to my final update: We have extended the due dates for submitting letters of intent and applications. They are now September 28, 2009, and October 28, 2009, respectively.

UPDATE: We just issued an NIH Guide notice that includes some additional information. 

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Welcoming the New NIH Director

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On Monday, Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D., became the 16th director of the National Institutes of Health. He was nominated by President Obama on July 8 and unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate on August 7.

Dr. Collins is well known in the scientific community and is very knowledgeable about NIH at all levels, serving as the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute from 1993-2008 and being a productive intramural investigator. NIH issued a news release with more biographical information.

Screenshot of NIH All-Hands Town Meeting with Dr. Collins

Shortly after being sworn in, Dr. Collins held a town hall meeting with NIH staff. In his remarks, he eloquently outlined his vision and priorities, which include securing stable funding for biomedical research, training the next generation of scientists and nurturing early stage investigators.

I had my first opportunity to work closely with Dr. Collins soon after I came to NIH in 2003. It was in the context of the Molecular Libraries Initiative of the NIH Roadmap for Medical Research, which includes the PubChem database. As a chemist, I was very interested in the initiative’s potential for building new linkages between chemistry and biomedical research.

In these and other interactions, Dr. Collins impressed me with his passion for principles, strategic thinking and careful preparation. I share the sense of excitement and optimism he expressed at the town hall meeting regarding the opportunities that lie ahead.

I encourage you to watch the hour-long video of the town hall event.

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Innovate Biomedical Computing!

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Biomedical Information Science and Technology Initiative

The trans-NIH Biomedical Information Science and Technology Initiative (BISTI) funds a range of projects that advance computer science and technology to address problems in biology and medicine. BISTI, which is led by NIGMS, has just reissued four broad-based program announcements to support “innovations in biomedical computing.” In the past, BISTI has awarded 198 of these grants ranging from $200,000 to $3 million.

The announcements cover traditional research projects; exploratory, high-risk/high-impact projects; small business innovation research; and small business technology transfer grants. They apply to most areas of NIH research, from basic to clinical, and require that more than 50 percent of the proposed research involve computing. For example, investigators can request funds for scientists and software personnel to develop models to analyze a disease, and they can also request funds to obtain data or perform experiments to validate the models. Again, in all cases the majority of effort should be on the computing side.

If you want to significantly expand your computing efforts and capabilities, these funding announcements are a really great opportunity!

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Recovery Act Status

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Recovery Act Logo - Recovery.govYesterday, 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.

Screenshot of NIH Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tool Expenditures and Results (NIH RePORTER)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.

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New Opportunities to Solve and Study Protein Structures

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PSI:BiologyWhether you’re interested in a single protein or many, you now have the chance to join the Protein Structure Initiative’s PSI:Biology network, which will apply high-throughput structural approaches to solve interesting biological problems.

We have just released three funding opportunities that will establish the core of the PSI:Biology research network:

Centers for High-Throughput Structure Determination – large-scale centers that will have the capacity to solve structures on the order of several hundred per year.

Centers for Membrane Protein Structure Determination – small centers that will devote special effort to solving the structures of these proteins.

Consortia for High-Throughput Enabled Structural Biology Partnerships – these awards will support functional studies of proteins proposed by individuals or groups of researchers from across all fields of biology as well as support the structural determination of those proteins through consortia with the PSI:Biology structure centers. Ideal projects will integrate functional and structural data for a large number of protein structures to solve significant biological problems.

In addition to these opportunities, we plan to issue program announcements for experimental technology development, computational and molecular modeling and more ways for partners to bring their interests to the target-setting table. We’ll announce these in the NIH Guide and here in the Feedback Loop.

If you have just one or two proteins that need to be solved, you can nominate them as targets for structure determination via the PSI Structural Genomics Knowledgebase, which offers a cool widget so you can easily access the site from your Web page.

UPDATE: The due dates for letters of intent and applications have been extended to September 28, 2009, and October 28, 2009, respectively. For more details, see NOT-GM-09-026.

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What’s Your Recovery Act Story?

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Recovery.gov - NIGMS InformationIf you’ve gotten funding through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, you know how important it is to tell people in your community that this support is having an impact. We want to hear from you, too. Your stories can help us show the American public how the Recovery Act is working to accelerate research, stimulate the economy, and create or retain jobs.

So please tell us about how this funding has helped you. The impact can be large or small, immediate or long-range. Did you hire a promising new scientist or keep someone from losing a job? Were you able to form new collaborations or purchase critical equipment? Did the Recovery Act help speed your research, enable you to make new discoveries, or advance science in other ways? For training programs, were you able to develop new curricula or other activities that you would not have been able to do otherwise?

We invite you to share your experiences now and in the future using our What’s Your Recovery Act Story? (no longer available)+ Web form. We’ll post a sampling of what you send us on our new Recovery Act Impact Web page. Check out the ones we’ve already posted there to see what your colleagues are saying.

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Moving Forward with Stem Cell Research

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New NIH guidelines for human stem cell research became effective on July 7, 2009. We thank those of you who provided comments on the draft policy. The input NIH received was instrumental in developing the final guidelines, which will generate a new registry of human embryonic stem cells (hESC) eligible for use in NIH-funded projects. This registry will be posted at http://grants.nih.gov/stem_cells/registry/current.htm.

Human embryonic stem cells

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NIH has now issued guidance on the status of applications and awards under the new guidelines. I’ve summarized the main points below, but see the notice for other important details.

New and competing applications may be submitted and reviewed. Until eligible hESC lines are listed in the new NIH registry, applicants should not identify a specific line, but should state that they will use line(s) from the registry.

Ongoing awards that use previously approved NIH hESC lines may continue to use these lines for research for the duration of the currently approved award.

Administrative supplements (including Recovery Act ones) may be funded if the supplemental activities use the same hESC lines approved for the parent grant.

Previously reviewed pending applications may now be awarded. However, these awards will be restricted from using funds for hESC research until the hESC lines to be used have been posted on the new registry.

The NIH guidelines and notice represent important steps forward in removing previous barriers to hESC research and advancing this very exciting and significant area of science.

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“Join Us on the Edge of Discovery”

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NIGMS LogoWe’ve posted a new job listing (link no longer available) for a position in the NIGMS Division of Cell Biology and Biophysics.

This position is for the Chief of the Structural Biology and Proteomics Technology Branch. This person will oversee the scientific and administrative management of the branch, which supports research using genomics or computational approaches to study protein structures and functions as well as the development of new tools to facilitate this work. In addition to handling a portfolio of research grants, the branch chief will also direct the Protein Structure Initiative.

The listing closes August 11, 2009. Spread the word!

UPDATE: This vacancy listing has been extended to August 18.

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The Blossoming of Systems Biology

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2009 Annual Meeting of the National Centers of Systems Biology

Earlier this week, I attended the annual meeting of our National Centers for Systems Biology, which was held at NIH. This was the 5th meeting since the program started in 2002, and one of its goals was to introduce NIH research staff and administrators to the exciting developments and applications of systems biology as well as the activities of the nine current centers.

Every year, I am more and more impressed with how systems biology has blossomed. This year, I was particularly pleased to see the sophistication and enthusiasm of the students and postdocs being trained at these centers. The junior scientists made a lot of new contacts over coffee and during the poster sessions, and the investigators benefitted greatly from interacting with each other, especially talking about how they handle the other goals of the centers program, such as outreach and training. A number of new collaborations were hatched.

The science presented by each center was very thought-provoking, especially the “lightning talks” delivered primarily by student presenters who had to get across the aim and conclusions of their research in just one or two minutes and using only one slide!

Outside the formal meeting, the investigators talked about the future of careers in systems biology and the professional paths of some of the students who have completed their training. It appears that the students aren’t having difficulty finding positions! There were some concerns that the intrinsically interdisciplinary nature of systems biology might pose some challenges as new hires seek to replicate the intellectual atmosphere, facilities and instrumentation that they became used to having. And, there was the question of how tenure would be handled in traditional departments with established boundaries. Most of the investigators thought that systems biology, like “molecular biology” before it, should be viewed as an approach, not a defined discipline, and that systems thinking would likely permeate the establishment as it matures.

I suspect that this year’s participants, like myself, experienced a strong sense of being part of a rapidly developing new wave of science. My overall impression is that the future of systems biology appears to be in good hands—an outcome we hoped for when the centers program was designed.

If you’re interested in systems biology and the abstracts of the science presented, you might check out our new portal for the centers, which made its debut at the meeting. It’ll be the clearinghouse for center activities and resources. It will also have a lot of information on available courses, lectures, research/job opportunities, funding announcements, available data and software.