NIH Grants Fund 18 ‘High Risk’ Harvard Projects

The National Institute of Health announced on Thursday that eighteen Harvard-affiliated scientists would receive five years of grant support for research that has the potential to greatly expand the scientific field and explore new frontiers.

NIH distributed $348 million in three categories: the New Innovator Award, the Pioneer Award, and a new program, the Director’s Transformative Award. Last year, the institute awarded $138 million in New Innovator and Pioneer awards. This year, an additional $210 million dollars was made available in grants, including $23 million that was funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act—or the stimulus bill.

The 2009 funding levels are the largest in the program’s 5-year history.

In March 2008, University President Drew G. Faust traveled to Washington to lobby congress for an increase in funding for bio-medical research. She emphasized the need for a real-dollar increase in the total amount of NIH funding, which is the single largest funding source for Harvard projects. This year, Harvard researchers have secured 16 percent of the 2009 NIH grants.

Genetics Professor Frederick M. Ausubel, who will use a Transformative research grant to work on solutions to antibiotic resistance, said that one of the difficulties of conducting high-risk research is that people are reluctant to fund a project if there is no guarantee that the results will be relevant.

According to Ausubel, the NIH grants allow researchers to develop hypotheses that are “compelling yet may not be correct.”

“Sometimes you need to take the risks. There is no 100% guarantee of success, but if there is, it pays off greatly,” he said.

Pardis C. Sabeti, an assistant professor of organismic and evolutionary biology who received a New Innovator Award, said she will use the funds to further her research into the Lassa fever which she describes as “the most deadly disease known to man.”

So far, in her research station in Irrua, a small town in rural Nigeria, the fatality rate of the disease has been reduced from 70 percent to 15 percent by using effective drugs and advanced diagnosis techniques.

With the grant she will be able to take her research further and investigate the possible presence of inherent genetic immunity to the disease, an advance that could reveal additional insights into the human genome.