President Barack Obama’s administration said today it plans to spend a total $86 million on a pair of initiatives designed to advance two research programs he has championed during his term in office.
The administration said it will spend $70 million to fund more than 100 new grant awards through the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative.
The new awards nearly double total White House spending on the BRAIN Initiative to more than $150 million for fiscal year 2016—an FY 2017 budget has yet to be adopted—and represents a doubling of the total number of awards made by the NIH under the effort.
The NIH said it is planning more than two dozen new grant funding opportunities for FY 2017—including proposals to produce a complete census of cells in the mouse brain, along with the data infrastructure needed to make that information readily available to researchers.
Since it was launched in April 2013, the BRAIN Initiative has generated a combined $1.5 billion in public and private spending, as well as the publishing of more than 125 academic papers detailing research funded through the effort.
The administration says active research programs related to BRAIN are being carried out by five federal agencies: the NIH, the FDA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the National Science Foundation, and Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity.
The White House also announced $16 million in additional spending on the Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI), designed to foster development of new and more effective patient-specific treatments for diseases.
A key component of PMI is a research cohort of 1 million-plus Americans from which to glean data—which the administration said has been renamed the “All of Us Research Program”—that is being developed by NIH with healthcare organizations, technology providers, patient and other community groups.
The NIH has selected four additional regional medical healthcare organizations, doubling the number that will enroll patients into the research cohort. The four are California Precision Medicine Consortium, Geisinger Health System, New England Precision Medicine Consortium, and Trans-American Consortium for the Health Care Systems Research Network.
The organizations will bring into the research program communities from Pennsylvania, New England, Minnesota, Michigan, Texas, and California, the White House said.
“These new partners will bring research expertise, increased geographic reach … and new methods of engaging hard-to-reach communities to the table,” the administration said in a statement.
“They will help to build a rich, secure database and set of tools that empower thousands of researchers—from citizen scientists to academics—to use this unprecedented repository of electronic health record, medication, survey, biospecimen, genomic, imaging, and wearable data to accelerate breakthroughs that will only be possible with a diverse population of volunteers.”
President Obama unveiled PMI in his 2015 State of the Union Address.