In Brief
Take Action: Close Out Biophysics Week with the Biophysics Advocacy Lab
The Biophysical Society is calling on all members to take action in response to the onslaught of actions, guidance and initiatives coming out of the federal government over the past month. We are seeking your assistance to:
Biomedical Research Mostly Avoids Major Cuts in FY25 Spending Deal
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Department of Defense (DOD) managed to emerge from fiscal year (FY) 2025 budget negotiations mostly unscathed, but with some programmatic hits could not be avoided. The agreement, signed into law on March 15, kept the federal government operating under a continuing resolution (CR) that maintains FY24 funding through September 30. However, the bill does deal major cuts for high-profile neuroscience and genomic medicine initiatives at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and a massive research grants program at the Department of Defense (DOD).
While the agreement leaves the NIH’s $47.4 billion base budget in place, it does not make up for a drop in the 2025 funding from a separate pot of federal money, provided under the 2016 21st Century Cures Act, for two efforts: the Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative and the All of Us genomic medicine project. Their total funding, which fell last year by more than one-third, shrunk further from $759 million to $479 million.
Within the DOD, a $1.5 billion medical research program that disburses grants to academic labs drops by 57%, to $650 million. The Congressionally Directed Medical Research Program (CDMRP) was set up 33 years ago to support topics not traditionally funded by NIH through a grantmaking process with an unusual amount of input from patient advocates. The 40 topics include cancer and research relevant to warfighters, such as traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder. CDMRP has stated that no existing awards will be terminated or suspended; plans for allocating its remaining funds this year are still being developed.
NIH to Shift Peer-Review Panel Responsibilities to Center for Scientific Review
Earlier this month, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced a new centralized system for vetting research proposals that will be implemented later this year. The Center for Scientific Review (CSR) will handle all responsibility for review; CSR currently reviews 78% of grant submissions, or roughly 66,000 per year, with the remainder being reviewed by peer-review panels. The new change in procedure will see peer-review panels eliminated and reductions in staff by as many as 300 scientific review officers (SROs) at the 23 institutes with responsibility for review panel operations. Some of those staff may be transitioned to CSR, which currently employs 284 SROs.
Director of CSR, Noni Byrnes was quoted as stating the proposed change has been under consideration since summer 2024 and stems from a cost analysis and discussions led by Lawrence Tabak. The analysis found each review conducted by institutes costs NIH on average three times as much as a CSR review and that “eliminating duplicative efforts” will save $65 million a year.
NIH Council and Peer Review Panels Resume Work
Last week it was announced that NIH advisory council meetings would resume in April, with the complementary medicine center, alcoholism and National Eye Institute (NEI) having already announced dates. The move comes after NIH removed a hold on meetings of NIH study which resumed this week.. The resumption of these meetings should allow NIH to address the enormous backlog of proposals and delayed well over $1.5 billion in grant funding that normally would have been disbursed at this point in the year.