PICTURE: Drs. David Mattson, Rick McIndoe, and Betty Pace-View More
Photo credit: Michael Holahan, University of Augusta
Dr. Richard A. McIndoe, bioinformatics expert and associate director of the Center for Biotechnology and Genomic Medicine at the Medical College of Georgia, leads a dynamic new $ 6.2 million federally funded initiative to support highly innovative research ideas in three areas with tremendous Effect on health.
This Innovative Science Accelerator or ISAC program establishes an expedited yet comprehensive review process that enables scientists to pursue some of their most innovative research ideas in kidney disease; the urinary tract in both sexes as well as the male reproductive organs; and the blood and the bone marrow.
“The idea is that ISAC will give investigators with high-risk, rewarding ideas seed capital and give them a year of money to see if their idea works. If it works, they will.” can use the data generated to apply for greater funding, “says McIndoe, who wants the new program to be as innovative as the scientists’ ideas.
The five-year initiative is a new program from the Department of Renal, Urological, and Hematological Diseases of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases of the National Institutes of Health.
The goal is to advance the science that matters to people’s lives and the opportunities are to give especially new scientists experience in writing scholarship, going through the review process and generating results, says McIndoe.
ISAC will provide scientists with an efficient way to receive a one-time grant of $ 100,000 that is intended to make it easier for them to apply for a larger, traditional NIH grant, the gold standard for biomedical research in the United States, or, conversely, to acknowledge that their idea does not deserves further pursuit.
Another primary function of ISAC is to host an annual scientific meeting for scientists working in these areas where award winners can showcase their work, and this will stimulate discussion and collaboration, says McIndoe, Regents’ Professor and Georgia Research Alliance Distinguished Investigator.
High-risk, high-profit research is often not funded in the traditional, highly competitive process of finding NIH funding, says McIndoe. For example, the 2019 payline for the NIDDK was 13%, meaning only 13 out of 100 scholarships submitted are funded.
About half of the scholarships submitted don’t even make it through the NIH studies department, which is staffed by experts in the field and who frontline reviews of scholarship applications, says McIndoe, who has sat on more than half a dozen sections of study during his career yearly.
As director of the coordination unit for ISAC, McIndoe will also work with NIH program officers with expertise in the area of interest of an application to identify other experts across the country. From there, he then manages the review process, including assigning reviewers and timely review.
He will ensure that the results and criticisms are returned to the NIH program officers, who are also grading the grant applications, and that the information, along with what the ISAC office determines as an eligible score range, is then passed on to another panel of experts in the field external evaluation committee of ISAC, and if they agree with the findings, the decision will be made.
Although the peer review process is extensive, it is about half the standard submission process for scientists and reviewers, starting with a three-page research plan instead of up to a dozen pages for an RO1, the NIH’s oldest approval mechanism, and making the application easier for reviewers digest, says McIndoe.
The ISAC working group recently opted to review applications three times a year to further expedite the process, and applications can be submitted at any time, says McIndoe. Scientists can start submitting proposals this fall, and the first annual meeting is likely to take place next spring.
The local ISAC working group that McIndoe will advise on kidney, urology and hematology research includes Dr. David Mattson, chairman of MCG’s department of physiology and established hypertension researcher; Dr. Jennifer Sullivan, pharmacologist and physiologist in the Department of Physiology who is also interim dean of the AU Graduate School studying blood pressure regulation and kidney health, with a particular interest in gender differences; and Dr. Betty Pace, pediatric hematologist in the MCG Department of Pediatrics, an established sickle cell medicine scientist who leads a federally funded national initiative to inspire the next generation of researchers.
ISAC’s target areas may change annually based on what is happening in the scientific literature and what experts in each field identify as hot topics to be pursued. The working group and the annual meetings will continue to facilitate these discussions and decisions.
An expert in big data management and analysis, McIndoe has already managed two other innovative NIH funding approaches and has a solid infrastructure to support this new initiative. For 20 years he has led the Consortium’s Coordination and Bioinformatics Unit on Diabetic Complications to fund shorter-term laboratory and human studies to better understand the complications of diabetes, such as heart and kidney disease and visual impairment. The consortium began as Animal Models of Diabetes Complications, which specially designed and shared good mouse models.
Fifteen years ago, he began providing similar services to the Mouse Metabolic Phenotyping Centers, which are making the specialized, expensive mouse testing capabilities of a select number of universities available and affordable to researchers across the country. The expertise includes things like characterizing mouse metabolism and analyzing blood composition.
Together, these NIDDK initiatives, which also host scientific meetings and support websites to support interested scientific communities, have resulted in thousands of publications demonstrating new knowledge and helping scientists earn larger NIH grants. For example, more than 60% of those who received a $ 100,000 grant through the Diabetic Complications Consortium applied for an RO1 and about 25% were successful. “That’s higher than the normal percentage and a goal of these types of programs,” says McIndoe. Both programs are due to expire next year.
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