Updates from NIH Advisory Council Meetings

As SPIN readers know, advisory councils to the NIH institutes have important policy making roles. Composed of scientific and lay members, these advisory councils meet up to three times per year and most perform the final layer of review on grants for their Institute or Center before the grants are funded.

National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)

On May 16, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (or as it may soon be called, the National Institute on Diseases of Addiction) held its spring Advisory Council meeting. In addition to a report from NIDA Director Nora Volkow that emphasized epigenetics and the Institute’s HIV research portfolio, Council members received briefings on secondary data analyses from Dr. Wilson Compton, Director of the Division of Epidemiology, Services and Prevention Research and an update on the Clinical Trials Network from Dr. Betty Tai, Director of the Center for Clinical Trials Network.

Some of the Q&A following Dr. Volkow’s presentation focused on the need to better integrate basic behavioral research with the HIV portfolio. Dr. Jacques Normand, Director of the AIDS Research Program, noted that NIDA has recently initiated a new mechanism to support that type of activity through the ASTART, analogous to the long-standing BSTART. It is worth noting that the NIDA HIV/AIDS budget jumped from $40 million in 2006 to $58 million in 2007, and NIDA has committed $65 million for 2008. So against an otherwise tight budget, this may be an excellent time for investigators to consider this area of research.

National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS)

APA has been encouraging the efforts of NIGMS to fund additional behavioral and social science research. NIGMS estimates it will fund $20.2 million of behavioral and social science research in Fiscal Year 2007 and approximately the same in 2008.

However, a new social science initiative was up for discussion in the NIGMS council. The council endorsed the concept of an initiative on Modeling Social Behavior in Humans and Model Organisms. The NIGMS council recommended that NIGMS convene a working group of experts including sociologists, behavioral scientist, computer scientists, mathematicians, and others to develop a report on the feasibility, utility and scope of interest of such an initiative. Funding for this initiative, if it is approved by the NIGMS council, would begin in Fiscal Year 2009.

Examples of research that might be encompassed by this initiative include measurement and representation of temporal and spatial dynamics of social behavior; impact of communications on social dynamics; implications of disruption of social organizations and dynamics; and use of virtual worlds as models of social dynamics.

Interest in this area has been piqued by NIGMS support of a project called MIDAS (Models of Infectious Disease Agent Study), which applies computational and mathematical models for the dynamics and control of disease threats. To read about one of the MIDAS analyses, please click here.

National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD)

Psychologist Lorraine Ramig Ph.D. (University of Colorado Boulder) led a discussion during the May advisory council meeting of a recent NIH meeting focused on behavioral and social science peer review. SPIN readers last month saw a report on this meeting, one in a series that the NIH Center for Scientific Review is sponsoring to get feedback from various scientific communities about the quality of peer review and whether changes are needed.

Dr. Ramig stressed two aspects of the discussions in which she participated at the peer review meeting. One concerned the need for senior scientists with a broad perspective to serve on study sections. Given the growing complexity of research that translates basic science to treatment, there is a tendency for review sections to be comprised of people with narrow expertise on various aspects of science, but less on a broad perspective. Several scientists commented that the ‘big picture’ perspective provided by more senior scientists is missing in some study sections.

Dr. James Battey, Director of NIDCD, then led a discussion of ways that study section service could be made more attractive to more senior scientists. One idea that he said is floating around NIH is to offer an incentive to senior reviewers by extending their current grants for a period of time. Another was to reduce the number of meetings that reviewers need to attend. Dr. Battey said that eight months represents the “revise and resubmit” cycle, and some discussion was ongoing about revising grant deadlines and study section meetings to adjust meetings to every eight months, or three every two years. He emphasized that these suggestions are part of the ongoing discussion about ways to improve peer review and adapt to its new realities. Five years ago, NIH reviewed about 46,000 grants per year. Now, the number is closer to 80,000.

Click here for more information, including a full report of the recent CSR meeting.

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