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News from NCRR
Interdisciplinary Consortia Will Tackle Complex Health Issues
NIH will fund nine new research consortia focusing on areas ranging from obesity and aging to organ design and genome-based drug discovery. These areas represent complex biomedical problems that have been resistant to solutions using traditional research approaches.
Each consortium consists of independent but linked research projects. Many consortia also have core research support facilities and training, career development, and education programs. Whereas various components of each consortium will be funded and administered by different NIH institutes and centers, NCRR and the Office of Portfolio Analysis and Strategic Initiatives will oversee the program as a whole.
Part of the NIH Roadmap for Medical Research, an NIH-wide initiative to speed the progress of medical research, the consortia will develop novel ways to think about challenging health issues by creating and supporting interdisciplinary teams of researchers.
As opposed to multidisciplinary research, which involves teams of scientists approaching a scientific question from their own disciplines, interdisciplinary research integrates elements of disciplines, creating novel approaches for tackling problems. “Interdisciplinary research involves large team interactions and a blending of minds,” says Greg Farber, who spearheaded the effort at NCRR. “The synthesis is really key.”
The consortia will be funded at a level of $210 million over five years. Each consortium has an overall principal investigator responsible for coordinating the efforts of the individual grant components. The interdisciplinary consortia, overall principal investigators, and their institutions are:
- Consortium for Neuropsychiatric Phenomics (Robert Bilder, University of California, Los Angeles).
- Interdisciplinary Research Consortium in Geroscience (Dale Bredesen, The Buck Institute for Age Research, Novato, Calif.).
- NeuroTherapeutics Research Institute (Paul Hagerman, University of California, Davis).
- Taskforce for Obesity Research at Southwestern (Jay Horton, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas).
- SysCODE: Systems-Based Consortium for Organ Design and Engineering (Richard Maas, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, Mass.).
- Northwest Genome Engineering Consortium (Andrew Scharenberg, Children’s Hospital and Regional Medical Center, Seattle, Wash.).
- Genomic-Based Drug Discovery (Edward Scolnick, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.).
- Interdisciplinary Research Consortium on Stress, Self-Control, and Addiction (Rajita Sinha, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.).
- The Oncofertility Consortium: Fertility Preservation for Women (Teresa Woodruff, Northwestern University, Chicago, Ill.).
