NIH Common Fund

The Office of Strategic Coordination - The Common Fund supports bold scientific programs that catalyze discovery across all biomedical and behavioral research. These programs create a space where investigators and multiple NIH Institutes and Centers collaborate on innovative research expected to address high priority challenges for the NIH as a whole and make a broader impact in the scientific community.

The NIH Common Fund supports research in areas of emerging scientific opportunities, public health challenges, and knowledge gaps that deserve special emphasis by the NIH. These are areas that would benefit from strategic coordination and planning across NIH Institutes and Centers, and should achieve specific, high-impact goals within 10 years. Common Fund scientific programs are bold and designed to catalyze discovery across any area of biomedical and behavioral research relevant to the NIH mission. These programs are initiatives that are not likely to be done by any other funding entity. They create a space where investigators and multiple NIH Institutes, Centers, and Offices collaborate on innovative research to address high priority challenges for the NIH as a whole and to have a broad impact in the scientific community.

The Common Fund supports over 20 programs that span the NIH mission. These programs are all designed to be:

• Transformative – strong potential for exceptionally high and broadly applicable impact in biomedical/behavioral research
• Catalytic – time-limited investments of 10 years or less, designed to capitalize on new scientific knowledge or breakthroughs to accelerate and enable subsequent research
• Goal-driven – include defined goals to develop specific deliverables (such as new knowledge, data sets, resources, methods, or technologies)
• Synergistic – advance the missions of multiple NIH Institutes, Centers, and Offices (ICOs), leverage expertise from multiple ICOs, and accelerate research relevant to multiple diseases and conditions
• Novel – pursue innovative solutions to specific scientific challenges important to the NIH mission but that no other entity is likely or able to address

Please refer to the Funding Opportunities section for specifics about current areas of Common Fund-supported science that are soliciting applications.

Common Fund additionally supports science through prize competitions. View open challenges at https://www.nih.gov/challenges.