Resubmitting at the NIH

Today, ORDE offered an e-Seminar on Revising & Resubmitting Your Grant Proposal, and Dr. Jennifer Kemp, Director of Research in the Department of Medicine within CU's School of Medicine offered us fantastic insight into what to consider when resubmitting your proposal to the NIH,

and I condense some of her key points below:

When you submit to the NIH and you're not funded, you have three options when it comes to resubmissions. You can resubmit as an A1 proposal where you make revisions based on reviewer feedback and submit your revised proposal with a summary statement of responses to reviewer concerns. The second option is to overhaul your proposal and resubmit it as a brand new proposal (A0). This means you will have no summary statement and it will go through the review process as if you submitted if for the first time. Third, if you realize that there was not a good fit at the study section you submitted to, you can resubmit the proposal to a different study section, Institute, or agency altogether.

So, how do you choose? Here's what Dr. Kemp recommended:

Submit an A1

This is a good option for you if your score was near the funding line and it seemed that reviewers were overall enthusiastic about your project. If the changes reviewers allude to are relatively minor, an A1 with the responses and revisions requested might be enough to push you over the pay line.

Submit an A0

If your score was well below the funding line (or above, since the lower the score, the better at the NIH) and/or if your proposal was triaged and did not get discussed at study section, it may be that the changes needed to bolster your proposal towards funding are so significant that you might want to completely rewrite the proposal and submit it as if it were brand new. Although the reviewers will likely recognize your proposal from reviewing it before, it may be better to start with a cleaner slate than to try to respond to the major and many criticisms they had.

Submit to a different study section, Institute, or agency

If upon seeing your reviews, it looks like you and your work are not a good fit for the study section to which you applied, you should consider going elsewhere. A conversation with a Program Officer can help you make this decision. One of our participants in the e-Seminar mentioned that he had asked his PO about submitting elsewhere, but the PO had argued that he should stay and even connected him with other funded PIs to help him build his competitiveness. But, if the PO agrees that you belong somewhere else, be sure to heed that advice.

You'll notice that not re-submitting is not listed among possible options here. :) This is because, although getting a rejection is brutal, you must remember that the most funded researchers have also suffered the most rejections, but they kept at it until they were funded and kept going. So go for it!!!

Resources:

Revising & Resubmitting Your Grant Proposal (ORDE video)