The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Common Fund supports the High-Risk, High-Reward Research (HRHR) program, which recently awarded a total of 88 grants to exceptional, highly creative scientists researching biomedical subjects.
All of the awards support the overall NIH mission, including engineering immune cells to create drugs directly at the disease site. Other featured topics include understanding the ways that parasites avoid detection through altering their surface proteins, creating a sensor to find antibiotic resistance in bacterial infections and making implants that use human electricity from heartbeats.
In the past, NIH has supported research projects but not individual investigators. This HRHR program specifically seeks out scientists who have ideas that could lead to high-impact outcomes. Unfortunately, many of these scientists are at a research stage where it is too early to seek peer-review processes.
For this reason, the awards promote creative thinkers who are turning exciting, innovative ideas into practical biomedical research topics. The program also manages the New Innovator Award, the Pioneer Award, the Independence Award and the Transformative Research Award.
“The program continues to support high-caliber investigators whose ideas stretch the boundaries of our scientific knowledge,” NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins said. “We welcome the newest cohort of outstanding scientists to the program and look forward to their valuable contributions.”
