The NIH-Wide Strategic Plan, “Fiscal Years 2016-2020: Turning Discovery into Health” was developed after hearing from stakeholders, scientific advisers, leadership, and staff at NIH’s Institutes, Centers, and Offices.
The plan discusses many leading research projects such as the multi-agency BRAIN Initiative and focuses on the leadership role that NIH will play. The BRAIN Initiative supports the development of entirely new technologies to better understand how the brain enables the body to record, process, utilize, store, and retrieve vast quantities of information,.
Engineers, computer scientists, nanotechnologists, physicians, and neuroscientists will use leading-edge technologies to measure real-time cognition, emotion, perception, and behavior in living organisms all at the speed of thought.
Ultimately the BRAIN Initiative will help reveal the underlying pathology in a vast array of brain disorders and provide new therapeutic avenues to treat, cure, and prevent neurological and psychiatric conditions.
The goal for NIH is to maintain and expand support of research aimed at addressing new computational challenges in accessing, managing, analyzing, integrating, and mining the huge amounts of data referred to as “Big Data” being generated by biomedical scientists.
One hope is that advances in bioinformatics and computational biology will help researchers conduct more experiments via computer simulation with the results used to generate and test novel hypotheses that can be rapidly shared with the broad research community.
The plan discusses how NIH hopes to achieve advancements by:
- Applying pharmacogenomics in real-world clinical settings to improve outcomes in the use of several drugs
- Performing a trial of a novel HIV vaccine expected to begin in the Republic of South Africa in 2016 to confer at least 50 percent protection against HIV
- Developing radical new methods for structural biology that will revolutionize drug screening
- Contributing to FDA approved therapies for at least a dozen rare diseases
- Applying certain mobile health technologies for use in enhancing health promotion and disease prevention
- Developing wearable biosensors for monitoring blood-alcohol levels in real-time to help prevent alcohol-related injury and disease
- Developing technologies to reverse paralysis and restore some normal functions to help spinal cord injury patients
- Conducting research on the artificial pancreas that will lead to advance trails showing significantly better management of diabetes, without dangers of hypoglycemia
Go to www.nih.gov/sites/default/files/about-nih/strategic-plan-fy2016-2020-508.pdf to view the Strategic Plan.