The National Institutes of Health’s announcement earlier this month that it will be enhancing its peer review system and committing $1 billion over the next five years for “investigator-initiated, high-risk, high-impact transformative research” is good news for the pharmaceutical industry.The announcement marks the end of a year-long effort by NIH to determine ways to enrich the NIH peer-review process. “The scientific community became truly engaged in this comprehensive effort to figure out how to make peer review work better for both the reviewers and applicants,” said NIH Director Elias Zerhouni, in a prepared statement. “The results of this collective effort are concrete solutions that will maximize flexibility, remove any unnecessary burden, stimulate innovation, and promote transformative research.”

The NIH will carry out over the next 18 months a plan to enhance its peer review process in order “to fund the best science.” The plan has four priorities, which include: providing more flexibility to reviewers and formally recognizing their efforts; improving the quality and transparency of reviews by shortening and redesigning applications; and removing multiple rounds of resubmission for the same application, particularly for highly meritorious applications.

NIH is an important source of funding for pharmaceutical research, and moves by the agency to facilitate the application and review process are a positive development. The changes are particularly important to prevent a slowdown in funding critical research, which is often a casualty of difficult budgetary times.