Priorities and Changes on the Horizon for NIH

I’m at the National Organization for Research Development Professionals (NORDP) annual conference this week, and we were excited to have a keynote by Sally Rockey, NIH’s Deputy Director for Extramural Research. Dr. Rockey writes a blog for NIH, which is a wonderful resource for those researchers interested in applying to the NIH.

Dr. Rockey addressed some upcoming changes to the NIH and their policies. She spoke about the NIH’s recent resubmission policy addressed on our blog a couple of weeks ago.  In addition she talked about the following:

Addressing Sex Differences in Preclinical Trials

Dr. Francis Collins and Dr. Janine Clayton just published an article in Science calling for changes in the way NIH PIs address sex differences in preclinical trials. They highlight concerns around how researchers are making choices around the sex of animals being used in experimentation, and the unintended consequences such choices can produce. To combat the unintended bias in preclinical trials, the NIH is beginning to form new reviewer policies that will focus on these issues in grant review.

Reproducibility of Experiments

Dr. Rockey also spoke about the NIH’s concern over the lack of reproducibility in many funded experiments. She talked about how academic science journals generally publish positive results from researchers, which then inadvertently promotes those results even if the majority of like experiments might yield negative results. Additionally, academic promotion and tenure processes often unintentionally push researchers to produce and move quickly in their research sometimes to the detriment of careful and reproducible protocol. Lastly, we often see a limited methods section in scientific journals in part because researchers are protecting their intellectual property.

This means that the projects that are promoted are not necessarily those that represent the typical results. Thus research can begin to follow a path based on erroneous assumptions. To begin combatting this, the NIH is designing a training module and a checklist for researchers to promote their careful attention to reproducibility of their preclinical trials.

The NIH is also looking toward revising their required biosketch to allow PI’s to expand on their previous contributions beyond a simple list of publications, so that they can include the significance of their contributions beyond pubs.

For those who have been funded by the NIH and those who want to be, it is important to stay abreast of these issues to be at the forefront in designing your projects to address these sorts of challenges now. Start by taking a look at the resources below.

Resources

Rock Talk – Sally Rockey’s blog
Policy – NIH to Balance sex in cell and animal studies
Policy – NIH Plans to Enhance Reproducibility