Megan Molteni , 2025-05-01 23:50:00
The National Institutes of Health announced Thursday it will no longer allow subawards to foreign institutions, as part of a national security-minded overhaul to how the agency manages its $47 billion research funding portfolio. The change is likely to cause immediate disruptions to research projects around the world.
“Subawards” are NIH funds that a grant recipient can give another organization to carry out a specific piece of the project. It’s an increasingly common practice for scientists to issue subawards to collaborators in other countries, especially as biomedical research has become both more interdisciplinary and more global.
According to the new guidance, the NIH intends to create a new grant structure that will eliminate subawards, replacing them with linked awards that the agency says will allow it to track funds with more transparency. NIH plans to implement the new system no later than September 30.
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