NIH moves to centralize peer review operations for grants and research

State of play: NIH proposed to stop letting individual center study sections run their own first-round peer reviews and instead consolidate all initial review efforts under the agency's Center for Scientific Review.

• Institutes and centers currently coordinate first-round reviews for about 22% of grants, according to the agency.
• NIH claims the change will save more than $65 million per year. The memo does not specify where this cost savings will come from.
• As many as 300 scientific review officer jobs at NIH institutes and centers could be eliminated as a result of the change, Science reported. CSR director Noni Byrnes told the journal that many staff will be moved to her central office, but did not specify a number.

Context: NIH grant applications typically go through two rounds of peer review.

• First, academics and research scientists external to the agency give feedback.
• CSR already coordinates more than three-quarters of first-round reviews, but some institutes and centers run them on their own, especially for large-scale clinical trials or projects with very specific review criteria.
• The application then gets a second level of review, conducted by an advisory council for the relevant institute or center. Final decisions on which projects get funded are up to the leadership of that institute or center.

Between the lines: Some scientists are concerned that this change — combined with the Trump administration's efforts to slash government funding for research overhead — will give politicians more power over what projects get funded.

• "My read is that this is a power grab making it easier for the current administration to influence not only funding priorities but also individual funding decisions. Am I missing something?" Carl Bergstrom, a biology professor at the University of Washington, wrote on BlueSky.

Where it stands: NIH leaders began discussing this change before the current administration took over, said Carrie Wolinetz, a senior principal at Lewis-Burke Associates who worked as senior adviser to the NIH director during part of the Biden administration.

• "As a pure policy matter, centralized review is not a bad thing at all," she told Axios.

• "It's more equitable in some ways, so that you don't have [center to center] variation in review," she said. "If done well, it actually could be a very positive policy change."
• The change will "mitigate the potential for bias by entirely separating the peer review and funding components of NIH," Byrnes said in news release. Byrnes has held her current position since 2019.

Yes, but: There are already strict policies in place to reduce bias in the review process, one NIH employee told Axios.

• "There are standard policies across institutes for mitigating bias across NIH and we adhere to it strictly," they said.

Details on how the agency will implement the change are also scant. Adding more than 20% more work to CSR will only streamline operations if more staff are added to the team, Wolinetz said.

• "The cost savings number, to me, seems really high without losing a significant number of people," she said.
• The individual institutes and CSR also have different areas of expertise in terms of the types of reviews they carry out, Wolinetz said. Institutes may review large grants that span multiple sites and disciplines, or conduct contract reviews of proposals for specific things the government wants.

Alison Snyder contributed reporting.