Newest NIH office will direct major future funding investments

Newest NIH office will direct major future funding investments

The new Office of Portfolio Analysis and Strategic Initiatives (OPASI) at the National Institutes of Health is poised to begin operations at the first of the new year. The new unit is charged with identifying and integrating information to support planning and implementation of trans-NIH grant initiatives.

While the office will begin functioning in January, it will take some time to ramp up to full operations. The agency is in the process of selecting an acting director for the new office and then will begin the search for a permanent director. Total staff is expected to be 13 people with a budget of about $2.5 million.

OPASI's three divisions are Resource Development and Analysis, Strategic Coordination, and Evaluation and Systematic Assessments. They have wide-ranging responsibilities, from internal evaluations to tracking health and funding trends. OPASI's missions are to: (1) provide all components of NIH with methods and information to improve management of their scientific portfolios; (2) identify important areas of emerging scientific opportunity and rising public health challenges; (3) assist in accelerating investments in these areas, focusing on those that involve multiple ICs; and (4) coordinate and make more effective use of the NIH-wide evaluation process.

The new office intends to involve the public in proposing and selecting initiatives to be funded. OPASI's portfolio of grants will be aimed at research that either cuts across or falls between the missions of institutes and centers (ICs). The initiatives would need to be novel projects not normally done by ICs Stakeholders, including the scientific and advocacy communities, would submit suggestions for potential research projects to OPASI. Proposals for research would also come from within NIH. The proposals would be reviewed by OPASI leadership, IC directors, a "council of councils," the Advisory Committee to the Director, and the NIH director. The “council of councils” would be a committee consisting of representatives of all of the advisory councils of the institutes and centers (ICs).

The initiative proposals that make the first cut would be further developed by OPASI staff in conjunction with IC staff. The list of more developed ideas would go through another round of review with IC directors and the Advisory Committee to the Director (ACD). Public representation would be achieved both through the council of councils and the ACD.

Once an initiative is funded, one or more IC would be assigned administrative oversight. Initiatives would generally be funded for five years. In a few cases, the agency would extend the grant for another five-year cycle with a hard-and-fast 10 year limitation.

Funding for the initiatives would be through a "common fund" composed of a set percentage of each IC's budget. Current funds for the NIH Roadmap for Medical Research will serve as the baseline for the common fund. Ultimately the budget could grow to up to 5% of the NIH budget, but the expectation is that it will be frozen at 1.7% until increases in NIH's annual budget exceed the biomedical research development price index (BRDPI), a Commerce Department measurement that tracks inflation in biomedical R&D. NIH predicts the BRDPI will be 3.2% for FY 2006; the budget increase for the agency, meanwhile, is anticipated to be less than 1%.