NIH Announces Stimulus Grant Competition

NIH has designated at least $200 million of the $10.4 billion in economic stimulus money it received from the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act of 2009 for a new initiative called the NIH Challenge Grants in Health & Science Research. The initiative will fund 200 or more grants in biomedical and behavioral research, each up to $1 million over two years. NIH has selected 15 challenge areas that it considers most likely to benefit from the funds. Those priority topics are behavior, behavioral change, and prevention; bioethics; biomarker discovery and validation; clinical research; comparative effectiveness research; enabling technologies; enhancing clinical trials; genomics; health disparities; information technology for processing health care data; regenerative medicine; science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education; smart biomaterials; stem cells; and translational science. Proposals for the challenge grants can be submitted electronically through the grants.gov website from March 27 to April 27. It is unclear what other biomedical research will be funded with the remaining billions of dollars in stimulus money given to NIH, but NIH Acting Director Raynard S. Kington says the agency will use multiple approaches, the first of which will "provide immediate infusion by choosing among already reviewed, highly meritorious R01 applications that have a reasonable expectation of making progress in two years."