National Institutes of Health Common Fund

The National Institutes of Health Common Fund (NIH Common Fund) is a centrally managed funding program of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that supports short-term, cross-cutting biomedical and behavioral research initiatives involving more than one of NIH's institutes and centers.^[3][4] It originated in the early-2000s NIH Roadmap for Medical Research and was given a dedicated appropriation and statutory authority in the NIH Reform Act of 2006.^[2][5]

NIH Common Fund

Funding program overview
Formed	2004[1]
Jurisdiction	Federal government of the United States
Headquarters	NIH campus, Bethesda, Maryland, U.S.
Annual budget	US$533 million (FY 2014)[2]
Parent department	National Institutes of Health
Website	commonfund.nih.gov

Common Fund programs are intended to be time-limited, goal-directed investments that create research tools, data resources, methods, or organizational models which, once established, can be sustained by individual NIH institutes and centers.^[1][2] Commentators have described the Common Fund as an alternative funding mechanism that promotes "convergence" across scientific disciplines while accounting for only a small fraction of the overall NIH budget.^[6][2]

Background and establishment

In the early 2000s, NIH leadership argued that the traditional, largely disease-specific institute structure made it difficult to support some types of cross-cutting research, such as shared technology platforms, broadly applicable data resources, or investigator-initiated "high-risk, high-reward" projects.^[4] Under director Elias Zerhouni, NIH launched the NIH Roadmap for Medical Research in 2003–2004 as a centrally coordinated portfolio of such activities.^[1][7] Roadmap initiatives were grouped into broad themes such as "new pathways to discovery," "re-engineering the clinical research enterprise" and "research teams of the future," and were funded by pooling a small fraction of participating institutes' budgets.^[2]

The NIH Reform Act of 2006 codified this approach by creating what was initially termed the "Common Fund for Shared NIH Research."^[5] The legislation authorized the NIH director to use the Common Fund to support trans-NIH strategic initiatives and established a Council of Councils—composed of representatives from the advisory councils of individual institutes—to advise on priorities.^[5] Subsequent commentary in the scientific press has treated the Common Fund as the institutional successor to the Roadmap, with Roadmap initiatives either becoming Common Fund programs or transitioning into institute budgets.^[1][2]

Mandate and program characteristics

Descriptions in policy analyses and textbooks emphasize several recurring features of Common Fund programs:^[3][4][1]

• they are intended to address scientific or structural barriers that affect multiple diseases or organ systems rather than a single condition;
• they are expected to be "transformative," for example by creating widely used tools, technologies, data sets, or models for team-based science;
• they are time-limited, with most programs expected to achieve their primary goals within about a decade;
• they are designed to be catalytic, with the expectation that successful elements will be taken up and sustained by one or more NIH institutes or centers once Common Fund support ends.

Commentary in Science and other venues has linked the Common Fund to broader efforts to promote "convergence" between disciplines such as biology, engineering, and the physical sciences.^[6][1] Within the overall Common Fund portfolio, a prominent share has been devoted to "high-risk, high-reward" mechanisms that provide substantial, relatively flexible support to individual investigators judged to have exceptional or unconventional ideas.^[2]

Administration and governance

The Common Fund is administered within the NIH Office of the Director. A dedicated Office of Strategic Coordination, housed in the Division of Program Coordination, Planning, and Strategic Initiatives (DPCPSI), coordinates strategic planning, implementation and evaluation.^[1][5]

Priority areas are developed through consultations with external advisory groups, scientific workshops and public requests for information, after which the NIH director, together with institute and center directors, selects a limited number of initiatives for support.^[2] The Council of Councils, created by the 2006 Reform Act, reviews proposed programs and provides recommendations on which initiatives should enter or leave the portfolio.^[5] Independent evaluations commissioned by the National Academies and others have pointed to the Common Fund as a vehicle for experimentation in NIH-wide planning, portfolio analysis and outcome assessment.^[8][9]

Programs and initiatives

Common Fund programs span a wide range of topics, including molecular tools, large-scale data resources, clinical research infrastructure, global health and workforce development.^[2][3] Examples cited in secondary sources include initiatives in structural biology, epigenomics, metabolomics, undiagnosed diseases, and high-risk, high-reward investigator awards.^[2][1]

Protein Capture Reagents Program

The Protein Capture Reagents program, active roughly between 2010 and 2015, aimed to generate community resources of affinity reagents against human transcription factors and chromatin-associated proteins.^[10] An editorial in Nature Methods noted that the project highlighted both the promise and practical difficulties of producing well-validated binders at scale, particularly for epitopes that are difficult to express or purify, and argued that long-term community support would be needed for quality control and distribution beyond the lifetime of the Common Fund program.^[10]

Harnessing Data Science for Health Discovery and Innovation in Africa (DS-I Africa)

The Harnessing Data Science for Health Discovery and Innovation in Africa (DS-I Africa) initiative is a consortium-based program that supports African-led data science projects aimed at improving health outcomes across the continent.^[11] Analyses of the consortium describe it as funding a network of dozens of awards, most led by investigators at African institutions, organized around research hubs, training programs and an open data science platform.^[11][12]

A 2023 review in Nature Communications reported that, in 2022, DS-I Africa awarded around 20 grants with a combined value of about US$74.5 million to accelerate health-related data science across Africa, including projects focused on genomics, digital health, and environmental exposures.^[12] Science news coverage based on this work has emphasized DS-I Africa's role in addressing data gaps for African populations by expanding data infrastructure, training opportunities and regional collaborations.^[13] A separate review of capacity-building initiatives for researchers in low- and middle-income countries identifies DS-I Africa as a major investment in data science skills and governance frameworks intended to help African institutions develop and apply data-intensive methods in ways that reflect local health priorities and ethical norms.^[14]

NIH Director's High-Risk, High-Reward Research Program

The NIH Director's High-Risk, High-Reward Research Program is a Common Fund initiative that supports "exceptionally creative scientists pursuing highly innovative research with the potential for broad impact" in biomedical, behavioral, and social sciences.^[15] Established under the Common Fund in the mid-2000s, it brings together four NIH Director's award mechanisms—the Pioneer, New Innovator, Transformative Research, and Early Independence Awards—to back projects that are considered too unconventional or high-risk to fare well in standard grant review.^[16] University news coverage routinely describes the programme as part of the NIH Common Fund and highlights its role in channeling hundreds of millions of dollars into early-stage and transformative research ideas each year.^[17][18]

Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS)

The Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS) is a Common Fund initiative that began in 2004 as one of the original NIH Roadmap projects to "re-engineer" the clinical research enterprise.^[19] PROMIS developed item banks and computer-adaptive tests to measure self-reported physical, mental, and social health across diseases, with the goal of creating standardized, cross-condition patient-reported outcome measures.^[20] The project is widely cited as a major NIH Common Fund success and has been described in clinical-methods literature as a "gold standard" framework for patient-reported outcomes that is now embedded in multiple health-systems and research platforms.^[21][22]

Science of Behavior Change program

The Science of Behavior Change (SOBC) program is a Common Fund initiative launched in 2009 to promote an "experimental medicine" approach to health-related behavior change.^[23] Rather than focusing on specific interventions alone, SOBC funds research that identifies, measures, and experimentally tests the mechanisms that underlie behaviors such as medication adherence, physical activity, or smoking, with the goal of making behavior-change interventions more robust and generalizable.^[24] Commentators note that the programme, funded through the NIH Common Fund and involving more than a dozen institutes and centers, has created a cross-disciplinary research network and a set of shared measures intended to "unify the science of behavior change" across conditions and settings.^[25][26]

Undiagnosed Diseases Network (UDN)

The Undiagnosed Diseases Network (UDN) is a nationwide research network that grew out of the NIH Undiagnosed Diseases Program and is funded by the NIH Common Fund.^[27] Established in 2014, the network links multiple clinical sites, sequencing cores, model-organism laboratories, and a coordinating center to evaluate patients with rare and previously undiagnosed disorders, using deep phenotyping and advanced genomic and metabolomic techniques.^[28] Academic and news accounts describe the UDN as a flagship Common Fund investment in precision medicine, emphasizing its role in discovering new genetic syndromes, providing long-sought diagnoses for patients, and generating data resources for rare-disease research.^[29][30][31]

Budget

When the Roadmap/Common Fund mechanism was introduced in fiscal year 2004, approximately 1% of each NIH institute and center budget was pooled, yielding a first-year Common Fund budget of about US$132 million, around 0.5% of the total NIH appropriation of US$27.9 billion.^[2] After the 2006 Reform Act, the Common Fund received its own line-item appropriation with statutory language indicating that, provided overall NIH appropriations grew faster than biomedical inflation, it could rise to as much as 5% of the NIH budget, but should not fall below 1.7%.^[5][2]

In practice, commentators have noted that stagnant or declining NIH purchasing power has kept the Common Fund near the lower bound of this range. For fiscal year 2014, for example, the fund's budget was reported as US$533 million, about 1.8% of NIH's US$30.2 billion appropriation, with a growing share devoted to high-risk, high-reward research programs.^[2]

Reception and impact

Assessments in the scientific and policy literature generally portray the Common Fund as a modest but influential component of the U.S. biomedical research system. A 2014 Science commentary marking the first decade of the Roadmap/Common Fund argued that the program had enabled the creation of shared tools, data resources and conceptual frameworks that would have been difficult to develop within the budgets of individual institutes, citing examples in structural biology, epigenomics and undiagnosed disease research.^[1]

At the same time, some researchers and patient-advocacy groups have expressed concern that, in a period of constrained budgets, increases in the Common Fund could divert resources from disease-specific research portfolios. A 2007 report in The Scientist quoted critics who described the Common Fund as a de facto "tax" on institute budgets and worried that expanding trans-NIH initiatives might come at the expense of programs in areas such as cancer and diabetes, even as others argued that cross-cutting investments were necessary to sustain long-term innovation.^[32]

Later evaluations and commentaries have highlighted both the scientific successes of Common Fund programs and the challenge of sustaining or institutionalizing them once they are required to "graduate" from the fund, leading to ongoing debates over how best to balance centralized, trans-NIH initiatives with traditional institute-based funding mechanisms.^[2][1]

See also

• National Institutes of Health