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Newly Re-Established Advisory Committee Opens Door for NIH Restructuring
The Scientific Management Review Board (SMRB) was recently re-established to advise the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on agency restructuring. Physicians Committee experts submitted a comment on the January 10th meeting recommending restructuring in support of human-centered research.
The SMRB was established by the NIH Reform Act of 2006 to advise on the use of organizational authorities, including establishing or abolishing institutes and centers, and reorganizing offices with the Office of the Director. Since its establishment, the SMRB has published numerous reports and influenced important organizational changes at the NIH.
One of these reports helped establish a new NIH Center with the mission of supporting and strengthening translational medicine: the National Center for Advancing Translational Science (NCATS). Since 2012, NCATS has been pivotal in addressing the inefficiencies in drug development and preclinical testing with innovative methods. NCATS, along with other initiatives like the National Toxicology Program’s Interagency Center for the Validation of Alternative Toxicological Methods (NICEATM), and the Common Fund’s Complement Animal Research in Experimentation (Complement-ARIE) program, address the inefficiencies of animal testing by advancing the development and use of nonanimal technologies like tissue chips.
In November, the SMRB reconvened for the first time since 2015 and was charged with evaluating and proposing changes to the current structure of the NIH, as well as considering current Congressional proposals on NIH reform. One of the proposals suggests consolidating the 27 NIH institutes and centers into 15, which would include combining NCATS, the Common Fund, the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, and the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health into a new “National Institute on Innovation and Research,” and cutting their collective budget by nearly $1 billion. While we appreciate the need for agency efficiency, shifting the structure and funding levels of NCATS and the Common Fund in this way would jeopardize NIH progress toward the broader use of effective, innovative human-centered research methods.
Instead, any agency restructuring should support effective human-centered research. For example, the Physicians Committee recommended elevating NCATS from a center to an institute to reflect its important role in human health, in line with a recent request made by the NCATS Advisory Council. We also recommended that NICEATM be established as an NIH institute with an expanded budget and scope to more broadly include biomedical applications.
The SMRB is set to meet five more times this year and will publish a report on these matters by year’s end. The Physicians Committee will continue to engage with the Board in ways to help reduce and replace the use of animals through agency restructuring.
