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NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya Outlines New ‘Unified Strategy’ Aimed to Align the Agencies Priorities
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Key Takeaways
- NIH's new strategy emphasizes transparency, public trust, and alignment of priorities and funding, focusing on AI, chronic disease, and nutrition.
- Shifts in research priorities include solution-oriented approaches to health disparities, focusing on youth transgender health over puberty suppression and hormone therapies.
NIH's new strategy emphasizes transparency, prioritizes urgent health needs, and shifts focus to domestic research and innovative health solutions.
The director of the US National Institutes of Health mentioned the agency’s need to become more transparent and earn the publics’ trust.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the director of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), issued a statement on the agency’s “unified strategy” which is aimed at better aligning priorities and funding. Dr. Bhattacharya notes the decision was made to provide clarification following the hefty budget cuts, grant cancellations, and plans to reorganize.
Winning back the public
In his statement Friday, Dr. Bhattacharya placed an emphasis on the need of transparency, regarding the agency and the American public, going on to mention the agency needs to display its intent of “honoring their trust.” Dr Bhattacharya pinpointed the integration of AI, alternate testing models & real-world data platforms, and including chronic disease and nutrition as key priorities for the agency moving forward.
“As stewards of taxpayer funds, NIH must deliver results that matter to the public,” Bhattacharya said. “Through this strategy, we will better leverage the synergistic missions of each NIH Institute and Center to fund the most meritorious science, address urgent health needs, and sustain a robust biomedical research workforce.”1
Focusing on priorities
Additional details on shifting priorities in the statement mention the NIH’s intent to “clarify specific issues that currently require additional guidance.” The mentioned “issues” involved are as follows.
- Autism
- HIV/AIDS
- Nutrition
- Research on racial disparities
- Transgender care
Another policy change relates to a NIH policy note back in April, saying the agency was able to pull medical research funding from universities offering diversity and inclusion programs. Also mentioned in the statement, the NIH is expected to “shift to solution-orientated approaches in health disparities research.”
Dr Bhattacharya writes, “In contrast to research that considers race or ethnicity when scientifically justified […] research based on ideologies that promote differential treatment of people based on race or ethnicity, rely on poorly defined concepts or on unfalsifiable theories, does not follow the principles of gold-standard science,”1
The statement continues to note NIH’s priority on advancing its research focus on what the agency referred to as “more promising avenues of research.”These specific avenues refer to researching the health of youth transgenders rather than prioritizing studies involving treatments of puberty suppression, hormone therapies, and other surgeries.
Dr Bhattacharya, writes, “Research that aims to identify and treat the harms these therapies and procedures have potentially caused to minors diagnosed with gender dysphoria, gender identity disorder, or gender incongruence, and how to best address the needs of these individuals so that they may live long, healthy lives is more promising,”1
New direction
With multiple organizational priorities shifting, NIH emphasized its preference for domestic research and the goal to win back the trust of the public following a period of organizational alterations.One of the key pieces of NIH’s new emphasis on domestic research is its new project management system that includes funding for foreign research institutes along with a blueprint for domestic training programs. NIH also placed an emphasis on prioritizing research that can be replicated or reproduced coming back to its focus on proving more transparency to the American public.
Sources
- NIH director lays out agency’s research and funding priorities in new strategy statement US National Institutes of Health August 15, 2025 https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/15/health/nih-strategy-priorities
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