NIH funding consortia
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has established a funding initiative through its Roadmap for Medical Research that will funnel money to nine consortia, in a move meant to not only provide new insights into medical problems, but also help change the culture of the agency. Spending $210 million over five years, the idea is to alter the way research is conducted. Each consortium will use an interdisciplinary approach to tackle its particular challenge, meaning team members first become familiar with each other's disciplines and then combine backgrounds to develop potential solutions that would not be possible from any single discipline. The goals of the initiative include not only dissolving boundaries within institutions and cross-training students in multiple disciplines, but also changing the NIH approach to interdisciplinary research administration. The focus areas for the nine consortia are neuropsychiatric phenomics; geroscience; neurotherapeutics; obesity research; organ design and engineering; genome engineering; genomic-based drug discovery; stress, self-control and addiction; and preserving fertility in women with cancer. Andrew Scharenberg, an associate professor at the Children's Hospital and Regional Medical Center in Seattle, is the principal investigator for the genome engineering group, called the Northwest Genome Engineering Consortium. He said the overall goal of his work is to develop genome engineering methods and apply them to gene repair in hematopoietic stem cells. The Roadmap program provides for “a rapid and coordinated expansion of the pace and scope” of research, he says, which would be difficult to duplicate through individual principal investigators submitting grant applications on their own. BH
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