The National Institutes of Health (NIH) plans to spend more than $250 million over the next five years to inject a mega-dose of creativity into its basic grants.

Beginning with funding of $25 million in 2009, conventional R01 grants will be supplemented by 'transformational' awards, or T-R01s. The agency will test new peer-review approaches to pick out "bold and groundbreaking" proposals that "reflect an exceptional level of creativity" and may "promote radical changes" in a field, the NIH said last week.

Investigators working in any NIH-funded discipline can apply for the grants. The agency says that areas of creative need include the science of behaviour change; protein capture; functional variation in mitochondria; complex three-dimensional tissue models; and pharmacogenomics.