This month the NIH celebrates the 10th anniversary of the NIH Common Fund, a funding mechanism created to support cross-cutting, trans-NIH programs that require participation by at least two NIH Institutes or Centers (ICs). These large collaborative, multi-disciplinary research projects often have the potential to encourage the development of innovative technologies and research tools that, until the development of the Common Fund, would have had difficulty meshing with the plans of any single one of the existing 27 NIH Institutes or Centers.
Over the last decade, the Common Fund has supported significant and transformative research, including the Human Microbiome Project, Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K), Extracellular RNA, Nanomedicine, Epigenomics, Undiagnosed Diseases Program, as well as the High-Risk, High-Reward Research Program that funds individual scientists with particularly innovative ideas or transformative technologies that may lack the preliminary data typically used to evaluate NIH grant applications.
To celebrate this significant milestone in the program’s history, on July 19th the NIH hosted the Common Fund Symposium featuring talks by Dr. Zerhouni, former director of the NIH (2002-2008), as well as many of the remarkable scientists who have led research projects supported by the NIH Common Fund. For those unable to attend the symposium, an archived version of the webcast is accessible to the public here. In addition, over the course of the Symposium, the winners of the first-ever Common Fund video competition were unveiled. This competition encouraged researchers to describe their work to the public utilizing wonderfully creative and often humorous methods, and are well worth a look!
