NIH makes $250m available for bold, transformative research

The nation's biggest source of biomedical research dollars is trying to make it easier for scientists to win grants for bold proposals that might be denied -- or not even applied for -- in the current tight funding climate.

The National Institutes of Health will infuse more than $250 million over the next five years into the Transformative R01 Program, it announced today. Researchers now apply for R01 grants to support their experiments, but in recent years the success rate has dropped as research funding has dwindled, after taking inflation into account. That slimmer chance for funding in turn has made researchers more cautious in the kind of projects they propose, leaders in academia and medicine have told Congress.

The new NIH program is intended to spur riskier kinds of approaches with the potential for high impact.

"Conventional wisdom says that R01 applications of this sort are 'dead on arrival,' '' Keith R. Yamamoto of the University of California, San Francisco, said in a statement.. He is co-chairman of the Advisory Committee to the Director Working Group on Enhancing Peer Review. "The hope is that the T-R01 Program will liberate scientists to unveil extraordinary ideas and approaches, and that novel review and support procedures will select the best for funding."