washington

The leaders of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have approved a streamlined procedure for research grant applications that will require budgets to be based merely on multiples of $25,000, not drawn up to the last cent.

The ‘modular’ grant format was recently given a provisional go-ahead by Harold Varmus, the NIH director, and other institute directors. The final details are expected to be approved by the directors within the next few weeks, with the scheme coming into effect with the round of grants for which applications are due on 1 February 1999.

Diana Jaeger, acting director of NIH's Office of Policy for Extramural Research Administration, says the aim of the streamlined process is to keep the focus of attention “primarily on the science”, for applicants and reviewers alike. She says the NIH wants to “disengage” from intense budgetary negotiations that “add very little value to the grants process”.

The new format has already been tested by several NIH institutes, and will apply to all investigator-initiated applications requesting less than $250,000 in annual funding. Under the scheme, applicants will be asked to provide a total figure for the cost of the project, expressed as a multiple of $25,000, and a written justification.

The latter includes estimated figures for four categories of expenses: staff, major equipment, laboratory alterations and renovations, and contracts or arrangements as a member of a consortium. Other items, such as travel, supplies and expenses, will no longer have to be itemized.

The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) began piloting modular grants in 1995. Ron Geller, the director of its division of extramural affairs, says the process has meant that “the reviewers don't spend a lot of time worrying about whether travel should be cut from $1,200 to $800”.

He says many investigators “felt overwhelmingly that it saved time, because they didn't have to deal with the detailed dollars in every single category”. Geller says his reviewers found the $50,000 increments used in an initial experiment too blunt.

Will the $25,000 increments tempt applicants to round their costs upwards? “We'll be looking for that,” says Jaeger, adding that the NIH is ready to cut $25,000 off any application that seems inflated. “Peer reviewers are also investigators, and they know what it costs to conduct a project.” A first-year assessment conducted by the NIH will also watch for trends in average grant costs under the new scheme, she says.

One scientist who won a modular grant under a pilot project welcomes the procedure. Louis Ptacek says he is “very positive” about the process. Ptacek, a geneticist and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, last year won $200,000 a year for four years from NHLBI and two other institutes to study advanced sleep phase syndrome, a rare sleep disorder.

Ptacek says that it was a “tremendous relief” not to have to contend with the budget detail of a traditional R01 application. “I had to give some general guidelines about how I intended to spend the money, but it didn't ask for the excruciating detail that is expected in an R01.” He estimates that the modular grant format could eventually halve the time he spends drawing up figures for his grant applications.