Posts tagged with ‘NIH’

02-24-10 | NIH and FDA Aim to Retool Regulatory Science

The Department of Health and Human Services, the National Institutes of Health, and the Food and Drug Administration today announced a partnership aimed at speeding new medical treatments from “microscope to market,” as HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius put it. The program will help researchers conducting basic biomedical research understand the regulatory parameters for drugs and [...]

02-17-10 | Investing in Recovery and Discovery

NIH funding directly and indirectly contributes to good jobs and is a proven engine of economic growth.

10-06-09 | Vaccine Helps Break the Habit

Cocaine is notoriously addictive, and even users committed to kicking the habit have a tremendously hard time cutting the chemical dependency. To help break the cycle, researchers have developed a vaccine aimed at stimulating an immune response that stops the drug from working. The National Institutes of Health reported yesterday that a clinical trial of [...]

10-02-09 | Collins Reports to Colbert

Joking that he is eager to grow a pair of crab claws, Stephen Colbert asked National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins last night what’s taking so long with stem cell research. In response to the Colbert Report host, Collins presented a smart example of how we need to make sure that we get stem [...]

09-30-09 | “Scientist In Chief”: $5 Billion in Recovery Funds Support Biomedicine, Create Jobs

“We are very grateful to have a president who respects science,” said Director Francis Collins this morning, addressing staff and leaders of the National Institutes of Health. Collins was introducing the man he referred to as “our scientist in chief,” Barack Obama. The president paid a visit to the NIH campus in Bethesda to announce what [...]

09-22-09 | Seeding a New Crop of Researchers Grows Controversy

Multiple blue-ribbon reports from the past few years have concluded what hundreds of post-doc researchers know: landing that first NIH grant is a daunting task. So daunting, in fact, that many younger scientists conclude that they’d rather move on to other careers than wait, on average, until their early 40s to win that first crucial [...]

09-21-09 | NIH Is Ready for Your Human Embryonic Stem Cell Line Approval Requests

The National Institutes of Health announced the launch of a new website this morning where researchers can submit approval requests for human embryonic stem cell lines. Accepted lines will be eligible for use in federally funded research. The site is the next step in the implementation of the Obama administration’s stem cell policy, announced in March, [...]

09-18-09 | Big Bucks for Science of All Sizes

Francis Collins took the reigns of the National Institutes of Health as director in August. Shortly thereafter, he invited a Kathy Hudson, a former colleague from the National Human Genome Research Institute, to serve as his chief of staff, a new role within the director’s office. This week, they each shared some of their thinking [...]

09-14-09 | Two Studies Demonstrate Selective Publication Trends and Gaps in Clinical Trial Reporting

Researchers running clinical trials are required to submit information to the NIH-run ClinicalTrials.gov database. But two recent reports indicate that compliance with this transparency mandate is spotty at best for trials that lead to published biomedical research. What’s more, many registered trials never lead to published studies, resulting in selective publication and outcome reporting that [...]

07-27-09 | A Peek Inside NIH Peer Review

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act provides at least $200 million for the 20,894 challenge grant applications the National Institutes of Health recently received. This influx of applications comes on top of the 16,312 regular applications received for the same June-July funding cycle, which raises the question, how is the NIH deciding which applications receive [...]

07-10-09 | Science and Values In One Nominee

Jonathan Moreno applauds President Obama’s intended pick for NIH director: Dr. Francis Collins, a researcher and leader who embraces science and ethics.

06-29-09 | Money and Methods in Cancer Research

The National Cancer Institute funds a lot of important research aimed at treating cancer, but some experts would characterize very little of it as transformative work. Gina Kolata’s article in the Sunday New York Times describes a system geared towards incrementalism rather than high-risk, high-return science. But a dearth of transformative work isn’t the only thing [...]

06-23-09 | NIH Funding is Good for Your Health, and It’s Good for the Economy

Federal funding for biomedical research saves lives. Not only that, but investment in research through the National Institutes of Health stimulates the economy by helping people stay healthy and productive. So says a new report published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (open access). Lead author Kenneth Manton at Duke University and [...]

06-12-09 | NIH By the Numbers: Challenge Grants, Stem Cell Comments, and Conflict of Interest Rules

A flood of grant applications for Recovery Act funds, a heap of comments on the proposed stem cell policy, and feedback on how to manage conflicts of interest among researchers—here’s a look at some of the key numbers related to the big policy stories at the National Institutes of Health: 20,894: The total number of Challenge [...]

06-11-09 | Nerd Busters

GQ’s new “Rock Stars of Science” campaign should give not just disease sufferers, but America’s scientists, hope.

05-26-09 | Can We Bank on Objectivity?

Managing financial conflicts of interest is a complicated policy matter, as researchers and their institutions often receive both public and private funding to support research that leads to new treatments. But research also indicates these conflicts are widespread and ingrained. How far should we go in addressing the issue?

05-21-09 | NIH to Help Bridge the “Valley of Death” for Rare and Neglected Diseases

Yesterday, the National Institutes of Health announced the creation of its new Therapeutics for Rare and Neglected Diseases Program. TRND’s goal is to bolster drug development for rare diseases that affect less than 200,000 Americans as well as neglected diseases that lack treatments, despite being common in some regions of the world. Most neglected diseases [...]

03-05-09 | Don’t Bury the Next Generation of Researchers Under Billions in NIH Funding

The NIH has about $10 billion from the Recovery and Reinvestment Act to pour into job-creating grants and research infrastructure. The Scientist reports that the new Challenge Grants program will direct $200 million of that money towards areas of high-priority research. One opportunity here, as Abel Pharmboy points out at Terra Sigillata, is for those [...]

02-27-09 | Quick Takes on Science and Tech in the President’s Budget

A quick glance at a couple early takes on R&D funding in President Obama’s budget request outline for FY2010: Science Insider: NIH details are sketchy, but include increases; NSF would see 8.5 percent bump; more for scientific facilities though DOE’s Office of Science; earth science research funding and Orion money for NASA; 37.5 percent increase for [...]

02-21-09 | Buckets of Jobs

Last week acting NIH director Raynard Kington described the outlines of the Institutes’ participation in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, popularly known as the stimulus package. New NIH funding totals $10.4 billion. Conservatives with a limited understanding (or, it seems, interest) in economics have decided that do-nothingism is a fair 21st century complement [...]

02-13-09 | Down Payment on a Scientific Future

Several science budgets fared well in the Recovery and Reinvestment Act compromise, but cross your fingers that we won’t need additional resources to combat bird flu.

02-04-09 | Senate Multiplies Biomed Stimulus

The Senate is doubling down on the House proposal to support biomedical research and innovation with the recovery and reinvestment package—and then some. The Senate version of the stimulus bill originally provided $3.5 billion in funds for the National Institutes of Health (similar to the House version), but an amendment (SA 178), cosponsored by Sens. [...]

01-30-09 | Change Young Scientists Can Believe In

Increased federal funding of basic research must be accompanied by thoroughgoing reform of the grant process to create a new generation of American researchers.

01-23-09 | Data Bank: NIH Funding By the Numbers

As we wrote last week, the current stimulus legislation moving through the House can help boost the economy by providing funds that support scientific research. In particular, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act would allocate $2 billion for biomedical research through the National Institutes of Health. The NIH will determine how to distribute the funds based [...]

01-22-09 | Where to Spend Our Research Dollars

Innovation to boost economic prosperity requires new ways to get more funding to our most talented young researchers.

01-19-09 | Quiet Heroes

The United States boasts a huge corps of public-servant scientists devoted to going where the evidence takes them and who, as of Wednesday, will for the first time in years be respected by the highest officials in the land for what they do.

01-16-09 | Recovering Innovation, Innovating to Recover

The proposed American Recovery and Reinvestment Act recognizes that science, technology and innovation have long provided the foundation for America’s prosperity, and are crucial to boosting an economy in crisis.

01-13-09 | Varmus on Funding for Disease-Specific Research

The Scientist this month features an excerpt from Nobelist and former National Institutes of Health director Harold Varmus’s forthcoming book, The Art and Politics of Science. In it he describes some of the subtly to accounting for research money applied to the study of specific diseases:

11-10-08 | A Taxonomy of Scientific Appointments

The Washington rumor mill is buzzing with names of possible science appointees—and there are dozens of major science-related positions to fill. The questions appointees will face are an opportunity for a clear break with past approaches.

10-21-08 | Ask the Expert Video: Rick Weiss on the Downward Slope of Biomed Research Funding

Weiss videoThe flat-funding of the NIH since 2004 hasn’t really been flat. In fact, Weiss reminds readers that “the NIH research budget has actually now dipped to an inflation-adjusted level about 13 percent less than it was five years ago,” according to the AAAS. And to top it all off, the extreme difficultly of securing a first-time research grant is sending young scientists packing for jobs in other sectors.

10-09-08 | Science Funding: an Investment, Not an Expenditure

Merril Goozner, a longtime Washington health and science gadfly who hosts the respected website gooznews.com, responded yesterday to my Monday posting about the negligent flat-funding of the National Institutes of Health. He makes the point that, bad as that policy has been, we should not forget that other important drivers of biomedical research and improved healthcare delivery have similarly suffered under recent Bush budgets. Read the rest of this post >

10-06-08 | Where’s the Biomed Bailout?

Congress last week passed a continuing resolution that will keep the National Institutes of Health budget flat-out flat for the fifth year running. The policy is flat-out wrong, as Americans who have diseases that five or ten years from now should be curable are going to have to wait a lot longer.

09-24-08 | HHS Rule Could Restrict Access to Contraception, Health Care…and Stem Cell Research

Birth control pillsThe Department of Health and Human Services to propose a rule that would ostensibly protect healthcare workers who object to performing abortion and sterilization procedures. The catch is that there are already federal laws in place that do just that. The regulation would instead open the door to denying patients access to all sorts of potentially controversial health care services. The comment period closes tomorrow.

09-22-08 | Kicking the Doorstop on Open Access

Since April, researchers publishing work done with NIH support must submit manuscripts for access in a free database. The experiment is working, but large journal publishers aren’t satisfied with the results.

09-16-08 | Genetic Privacy in Practice

DNA under magnifying glassAt the beginning of the month, NIH pulled pooled GWAS data from its website and began encouraging other institutions to follow suit, because a team of scientists have figured out just how to identify a single person’s DNA from a sample of hundreds.

09-12-08 | Week in Review: All the Science Advice a New President Can Handle

USA in a flaskArt Caplan offered his “Six Easy Pieces” for improving medicine and life science in a recent column. But we’re not the only science publication looking forward to the possibilities of the next administration.

09-09-08 | Six Easy Pieces

Americans know that the future fortunes of the country rest on scientific and technological advances, so Mr. President, let’s take biomedical science policy seriously.

08-01-08 | Doubling Down on NIH Funding

This week’s Policy Forum in Science addresses the “structural disequilibria” in biomedical research that has resulted from the recent funding history of the National Institutes of Health. Addressing these problems would create a more hospitable career path for young researchers and yeild more medical advances.

07-02-08 | President Signs Science Supplemental

On Monday President Bush signed a supplemental appropriations bill granting $337.5 million in additional funding to various federal scientific agencies. The support is good news, but the administration should not have neglected the financial health of these vital groups in the first place.

05-28-08 | Howard Hughes Funds High-Risk, High-Return Research

This week, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute stepped in with $600 million in grant funding to 56 biomedical researchers pursuing high-risk, high-return work. The federal government should also fund researchers who “swing for the fences.”

05-13-08 | How Much Science Could $135.4 Billion Buy?

President Bush’s latest request for Iraq war funding totals approximately $135.4 billion. What if we spent that money on domestic scientific research and development? Boosting R&D by the numbers.

04-08-08 | NIH Open Access Policy for Grant Recipients Begins Today

The 2008 appropriations package included a provision requiring that any published articles emerging from research supported by the National Institutes of Health must be deposited in the PubMed Central database, where they will be available through open access, within 12 months of publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

03-12-08 | New Report Argues That “Broken Pipeline” At NIH Is Leaking Young Investigators

After steady increases from 1998 to 2003 that doubled the budget for the National Institutes of Health, five years of stagnant funding have reduced purchasing power at the NIH by 13 percent, according to a report released yesterday by a consortium of research universities.

01-22-08 | The Dish: Sampling Today’s News – January 22, 2008

Petri dishIs the NIH monitoring conflicts of interest?; EPA won’t explain itself on nixing state emissions caps; controversial framing of new MRSA study; new paths to energy-efficient electronics.

11-14-07 | Snap Observations: Labor-HHS Veto, One Laptop Per Child, Rewarding Drug Development, “Right to Dry”

ClotheslinePresident Bush vetoed the Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill, which would have increased funding for the National Institutes of Health from $29 billion to $30 billion and required open access to published NIH-funded research.

11-09-07 | Survey Reminds Research Institutions They Must Support Women’s Careers

Percentages of men and women on tenure track at NIHFamily responsibilities are forcing many women to leave the upper ranks of life science research, according to a new survey of fellows at the National Institutes of Health.

10-15-07 | Snap Observations: Research Corridors Drive the Economy, Congress Considers Science Funding

U.S. Capitol buildingThe University of Michigan is hosting a conference on developing technology corridors this week as the Senate considers two major appropriations bills that fund science agencies.
Close
E-mail It