NIH Extramural Nexus (News)

NIH has released its first Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) under the new Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) SimplerNOFO initiative, which aims to make funding opportunities more accessible, understandable, and actionable for applicants.

NIH’s policies and funding approaches are designed to maintain strong support for investigator-initiated fundamental research. NIH’s Gold Standard Science plan explains that our priority-setting processes provide strong support for hypothesis-driven research while balancing opportunities to support other forms of research. Advancing foundational knowledge of human health and disease is a stated goal for the next NIH-wide strategic plan. Here we discuss NIH’s continued commitment in this area.

The rapid adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) has led to powerful new advances in biomedical research. Alongside these NIH-supported scientific advances and priority research areas involving AI, we have also occasionally observed challenges with the use of these tools that affect the integrity of the science we support. Today, we are sharing some helpful reminders on the appropriate use of AI tools when applying, managing awards, and conducting the research process itself.

NIH has advanced initiatives to strengthen transparency and ensure disclosure of other support. These actions build on prior work to address risks associated with foreign interference while reinforcing that honesty, transparency, and funding‑overlap prevention remain non‑negotiable requirements.

A new eRA Commons enhancement allows users to consolidate multiple accounts into a single Multi-Factor Authentication capable linked set of credentials to help streamline and reduce the burden of managing multiple accounts.

We are sharing upcoming NIH National Advisory Council or Board (NAC) meetings for your awareness.  

NIH supports a wide range of scientifically sound approaches to advance our understanding of human health and disease. As we continue to encourage approaches that enhance human relevance and translational potential, investigators should still select the models most appropriate for their specific research questions.

Watch NIH’s 6-minute overview of the new Collaborative International Research Project (PF5) award structure to learn key features, application format, and how applications may be split into linked awards after review and before Just-in-Time requests.

We have issued a new 2026 Pilot DMS Plan format based on a simplified set of required elements to use when preparing Data Management and Sharing (DMS) Plans.

The reliability of biomedical research is foundational to public trust in science and to ensuring that findings can benefit patients and communities. NIH’s Gold Standard Science plan advances this commitment by encouraging a culture that values replication and reproducibility. In support of this plan, NIH has launched a new Replication and Reproducibility Initiative to drive, incentivize and institutionalize replication and reproducibility efforts across the biomedical research enterprise.