Funding to research top priority, says US med research agency head Jay Bhattacharya

The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) remains committed to funding ambitious, innovative research, with a particular emphasis on early-career scientists and frontier science, its director, Dr Jayanta ‘Jay’ Bhattacharya, has said. He also stressed that the agency’s overall research budget has not been cut and that the NIH is on track to have one of its strongest years in terms of grants awarded to early-career investigators.

Bhattacharya, a Kolkata-born physician and health economist who is the 18th director of the US Department of Health and Human Services’ premier medical research agency, said the NIH was eager to support researchers who “think creatively and have ambitious ideas.”

“We are renewing our emphasis on research that is within the scope of the NIH mission, scientifically rigorous, and actionable for people who rely on NIH-funded research projects,” Bhattacharya said during a virtual interaction with reporters and fellows of the Health Coverage Fellowship programme conducted by the Centre for Health Communication at the Harvard T H Chan School of Public Health in Boston.

Responding to a query from The Indian Express on Indo-US scientific partnerships, Bhattacharya said collaboration with scientists abroad remained important to American science. “Continued collaboration through NIH should rest on strong scientific rationale and clear potential benefit to the American public in addition to foreign benefit. We also need to ensure foreign institutions receiving our taxpayer money have the same level of oversight as domestic institutions,” he said.

Key priorities

According to the NIH director, the agency’s key priorities include promoting more frontier science and research by early-career scientists; sharpening its focus on chronic diseases, including chronic childhood diseases and nutrition; prioritising next-generation tools such as artificial intelligence, human-based research models and real-world data platforms; strengthening oversight of NIH-funded research conducted abroad; and expanding support for replication studies.

NIH on track for one of its ‘best years’ in grants awarded

Asked about concerns that scientists are spending increasing amounts of time preparing grant applications, even as the probability of receiving funding has declined because of a shift towards forward funding, Bhattacharya said the share of forward-funded projects could fluctuate from year to year.

“This does not affect the total amount of research funded over a multiyear period. Importantly, NIH’s overall research budget has not been cut, and the NIH is on track to have one of the best years ever in terms of the number of grants awarded to early-career investigators. We are eager to fund researchers who think creatively and have ambitious ideas,” he said.

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On funding ‘edge science’

Asked how much the NIH had increased support for innovative or ‘edge’ science under his leadership, Bhattacharya said the agency was using a variety of mechanisms to support new ideas.

“One example is a new tool we created called Highlighted Topics, which allows us to signal our priority areas of interest under broad parent Notice of Funding Opportunities (NOFOs). This reflects a fundamental shift: instead of issuing prescriptive NOFOs, we are soliciting investigator-driven research, broadening the scope of ideas coming in,” he said.

Another mechanism, he said, was the use of challenge prizes designed to encourage new approaches to difficult scientific problems.

“Because early-career researchers are disproportionately likely to explore novel ideas rather than incremental research, the increase in grant awards to early-career researchers this fiscal year is a measure of strong progress in funding more novel ideas and frontier research,” Bhattacharya said.

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Organoids and accelerating research into rare disease therapies

Bhattacharya said the NIH had recently launched the Standardized Organoid Modelling (SOM) Center, described as a first-of-its-kind NIH-wide integrated platform dedicated to developing standardised organoid-based New Approach Methodologies (NAMs). Organoids are lab-grown models of human organs made with human stem cells.

“Encouraging the development and use of more human-relevant models is a key priority for NIH. Organoids have the potential to make biomedical research far more efficient by allowing researchers to test disease mechanisms and potential therapies at much higher throughput and scale than is possible with many traditional animal models,” he said.

“This is particularly important for rare diseases, where patient populations are small and suitable animal models may not exist,” he added.

Measles outbreak

On the challenges of addressing the measles outbreak in the United States, Bhattacharya said that, like any public health challenge, measles outbreaks were complex and multifactorial.

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According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as of October 1 this year, there were 3,887 confirmed measles cases in the US, with 42 new outbreaks reported in 2026. Bhattacharya said the responsibility for responding to outbreaks chiefly rested with other agencies, particularly the CDC. “I am confident in Dr Erica Schwartz’s leadership abilities at the CDC,” he said.