Council News Vol. 7, no. 2

FEATUIRE
arlicle
SPEEDING UP GaANT AWARDS: THE NEXT STEP
NIAID is narrowing the gap between application receipt and award
dates by as much as 75 percent, offering an approach that would
benefit both NIH and its extramural research community.

A new hyperaccelerated review process will cut
receipt to award time to about three months (see
timeline below) from the NIH norm of one year,
while maintaining or even enhancing the quality of
peer review. It builds on our creation and implementation of electronic initial and Council review
systems, which NIAID has licensed to other NIH
organizations (see box at upper right of next page).
Following the successful collaboration of NIAID
and CSR's Tropical Medicine and Parasitology
(TMP) study section (see last newsletter issue), the
pair are now working on two new steps:
* a request for applications (RFA) called
Hyperaccelerated Award/Mechanisms in
Immune Disease Trials
* an accelerated approach for the eight new AIDS
study sections

Hp4perocceleroted IFA
Published in May, the RFA features monthly receipt dates, applicant self-referral to NIAID, and a
new study section that will be specially trained in
the new system.
It takes a big step forward from the TMP work by
cutting target time to funding from five months to
13 weeks from application to receipt.
The move to use these innovations stems in part
from feedback from workshop and focus group
participants, who highlighted the importance of
studying mechanisms of interventions and disease.
Industry-supported clinical trials often omit evaluating immunologic and other parameters in patient
samples. With the RFA, NIAID is striving to make
awards more compatible with timelines of indus
Timeline for Hyperaccelerated Awards

Reviewer
comments
and scores
on Internet

Receipt

Applicant
gets award

U f~4.i~1 Is) Wi~~*1[e I miaai~.i in~S~i IiISIIT,~ViTkli@

0

2

Month

A
3 Council
review of
scores
and raw
critiques
on Internet

4