Notes on NIH matters as the government opens up again

A tweet from someone apparently positioned to know claimed the damage totals from the government shutdown amounted to 379 study sections postponed, within which 24,380 NIH grant applications were supposed to be reviewed.

That’s an average of 64 proposals per section. If we go by pre-chaos success rates, this is something on the order of 4,876 NIH projects which would eventually be funded.

I was on one of these cancelled study sections and I can report that the SROs have lept into action to try to reschedule the cancelled meetings. Due to the requirement to post meetings for 30 days in advance on the Federal Register, this pushes the first possible dates into mid December, the week before the winter holidays hit. I think it is very unlikely that many of these will be held before January. This means a VERY tight window before the usual late-January scheduling of Advisory Councils that would normally be taking up these now delayed proposals. Maybe NIH ICs can push their Council meetings back by a month? This would seem to be the only way to stay roughly on track for April 1 as the first possible funding date.

Interim good news about the the cancelled study sections. Mine entered read phase during the shutdown, and we were able to upload our critiques. This is slightly annoying now because instead of simply uploading a document template for each review, we had to enter text directly into the web interface. But when the meeting date passed, the study section disappeared from the Internet Assisted Review section of eRA Commons. If anyone had not kept a copy of their review comments, well, there was concern. Luckily, our restored study section has gone back to Submit but all the prior work appears to be intact, at least for my critiques. Phew.

We’ve heard rumor from several directions that the next two rounds of study section will use a 70% triage line. Meaning instead of discussing approximately half of the applications assigned to a given study section, only 30% will be discussed. Referencing the above-mentioned average this takes it from about 32 proposals discussed in a study section to 19 proposals that will be discussed.

Why? Well, this may permit one day meetings in place of two day meetings and it will certainly cut down the amount of time SROs have to devote to writing up the resume of discussion. This latter is not as trivial as it sounds, I estimate. The former may assist with actually scheduling replacement meetings, as it is easier to get 25 busy PIs to coincide on a single free day in their schedule compared with an adjacent pair of days.

People on the socials seem to think this will be bad for applicants. It does suck if you get a ND. From an emotional perspective for sure, but also for a thin advantage you might have for 1) a pickup from program and 2) a better score on the revision. This latter is anecdotal and I don’t think I’ve ever seen data suggesting a discussed grant and a not-discussed grant which have similar criterion and overall impact scores from initial review fare differently in revision.

The NOT-OD-26-005 gives “Interim Guidance on Reopening of NIH Extramural Activities” within which there is one interesting promise.

As of today, we can confirm that we will be rescheduling all October and November grant application submission deadlines (specific dates to be announced in a future Notice).

This sounds like we will be able to submit grant applications to be considered in Cycle III, as if they had been submitted Oct 5-Nov15, etc. This is a bit odd since as far as I know (having submitted a proposal during the shutdown) eRA commons accepted submissions during the shutdown. They haven’t been referred to study section or IC, but they were accepted. So what gives? Why is it important to open up submissions if the usual dates were available?

The rationale for this is given as:

By delaying due dates that occurred both during the lapse in funding and in the week following, applicants will have access to NIH staff and the help desks as they develop their applications.

I dunno that this is convincing, although I’m sure the less research intensive universities and private companies applying for SBIR funds were more likely to have problems. I do wonder what fraction of submissions received by any new (Dec 15?) deadline will be from applicant institutions that genuinely needed NIH staff help on a technical level versus additional proposals from institutions like mine that have no need for such assistance.