via Med Page Today, by Emily P. Walker
Although $10.4 billion allocated to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the economic stimulus bill is aimed at creating jobs, a top official said the agency will still fund projects based on their science, rather than their economic impact.
However, Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said NIH will change its scoring procedures with an eye toward projects that could conclude most of their research within two years.
That's because the money came with a hitch: the research should be short-term projects, or those most likely to deliver the most bang to the economy for the stimulus buck.
"In biomedical research, two years is a very short amount of time," Dr. Fauci said at a Monday presentation sponsored by the American Association of Medical Colleges on how NIH plans to spend the stimulus money.
"It's not like we're paying money to build a bridge from here to there and in two years it's finished," he said, referring to the ongoing nature of scientific discoveries.
Still, short-term projects, or those that will likely still have funding after fiscal 2010, are likely be favored.
Regardless of the strings attached, the cash infusion will be welcome for the agency whose funding has remained static for years while the demands of research -- and cost of funding it -- have increased.
Dr. Fauci said NIH will not concern itself with a project's direct pipeline into the economy because it assumes that all projects will provide additional jobs in the field. He said that for every one dollar put toward biomedical research, $2.50 is pumped into the economy.
About $7 billion of the stimulus money will go toward what Dr. Fauci termed "research priorities," while $1 billion will fund construction and capitol improvements at research universities.
Half a billion will go toward improving NIH buildings in Bethesda, Md..
Dr. Fauci's institute, which does research on HIV/AIDs, tuberculosis, influenza, and other infectious diseases, will receive a little over $1 billion, distributed among several funding areas.
The money will fund "challenge grants," which will include a project to examine what happens to a body in the early stages of HIV infection.
"A considerable amount of the immune system is destroyed in the first years, but we don't know how that works," Dr. Fauci said.
Other challenge grants will fund research to develop diagnostic tools for TB -- which infects one-third of the world's population -- and conduct research on neglected tropical diseases. (See NIH Announces New Rare Disease Drug Program)
Dr. Fauci also announced a new research project to test "big and bold" initiatives to stop the spread of HIV.
These include testing the effectiveness of pre-exposure prophylaxis on high-risk individuals, and a "test to treat" model, in which every person in a particular population is tested annually for HIV and treated immediately if the virus is detected.
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