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(Circulation. 2007;116:683-684.)
© 2007 American Heart Association, Inc.

Special Report

Notes From the Director, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute

NHLBI Core Values and Shaping the 2007 Budget

Elizabeth G. Nabel, MD; Susan B. Shurin, MD

From the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Md.

Correspondence to Elizabeth G. Nabel, MD, Director, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, National Institutes of Health Bldg 31/5A48, 31 Center Dr, Bethesda, MD 20892. E-mail nabele@nih.gov.

Key Words: budgets • health care economics and organizations • United States Institutes of Health

An extract of the first 250 words of the full text is provided, because this article has no abstract.

With fiscal year 2007 well under way, we write to report on the status of our budget for the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI). As a result of a Congressional joint resolution, the NHLBI received an allocation of $2 918 808 000, which represents an increase of 1% over the comparable figure for fiscal year 2006.

The NHLBI has a longstanding and powerful commitment to preserve and enhance investigator-initiated research and to develop and support new investigators. In these difficult times, the NHLBI’s top priorities will be to stay true to these core values. To accomplish this objective, we have developed a number of strategies to assist investigators in launching successful research careers and riding out tough times. Several policies are designed to ease the path to independence for new investigators (http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/funding/policies/operguid.htm):

• Investigator-initiated research: We intend to use 70% of the NHLBI budget for research project grants and to scale back, as necessary, the release of NHLBI-initiated programs.
  
• New investigators: We are strongly committed to expanding the pipeline of new talent needed to support biomedical research in the future. Since fiscal year 2005, we have been giving new investigators an advantage by increasing the pay line for their regular research grant (R01) applications by 5 percentile points and funding their R01s for the full recommended project period. Applicants who fall short of the new-investigator pay line by 6 to 10 percentile points are offered an opportunity to address the concerns of the initial review group and receive an . . . [Full Text of this Article]