FY 2016 Major Changes in Budget Request
Major changes by budget mechanism and/or budget activity detail are briefly described below. Note that there may be overlap between budget mechanisms and activity detail and these highlights will not sum to the total change for the FY 2016 President’s Budget for NIA, which is $69.555 million more than the FY 2015 Enacted Level, for a total of $1,267.078 million.
Research Project Grants (+$54.814 million; total $863.549 million):
NIA will award a total of 1,538 RPGs, an increase of 114 from the FY 2015 Enacted Level. This includes a $50.0 million increase for Alzheimer’s disease (AD) research. The increase also includes $12.118 million for new and competing RPGs.
Research Centers (+$4.952 million; total $103.196 million):
Precision Medicine. NIH proposes to launch a national research cohort of one million or more Americans – to propel our understanding of health and disease and set the foundation for a new way of doing research through engaged participants and open, responsible data sharing. Participants who voluntarily choose to join this effort will be able to share their genomic data, biological specimens, and behavioral data, and, if they choose, link it to their electronic health records (EHRs), taking advantage of the latest in social media and mobile applications, and with appropriate privacy protections in place. Bona fide researchers from across the country will have access to data voluntarily provided, thereby crowdsourcing rich data to the brightest minds in biomedical research. The cohort will be built largely by linking existing cohorts together taking advantage of infrastructure, data security and expertise already in place. NIH will help to connect these existing cohorts, but the current sponsors of the cohorts will maintain their ownership and management. Research on this scale promises to lead to new prevention strategies, novel therapeutics and medical devices, and improvements in how we prescribe drugs – on an individual and personalized basis. NIA estimates $4.2 million for precision medicine in FY 2016.