Among the $53 million in RFAs issued by NIH last week were two RFAs for pilot clinical trials in pediatric chronic kidney disease. These are significant for us because the RFAs establish a network of three participating clinical centers and a coordinating center. Total being committed to the project? $1.5 million. That includes the money for the pilot clinical trials themselves, as well as all the infrastructure aspects of the arrangement.
Obviously, we don’t know whether this is predictive of the money that will be offered in the ME/CFS RFAs in December. But it is important to realize that RFAs don’t have to be huge, even when they support multiple centers and data coordination. We won’t know how much NIH is committing to ME/CFS until the RFAs are actually published.
Here are the current cumulative numbers:
| FY 2017 | FY 2016 | |
|---|---|---|
| RFAs Issued | 36 | 352 |
| Dollars Committed | $202,127,000 | $2,840,680,617 |
| RFAs for ME/CFS | ZERO | ZERO |
And here is the table for FY 2017 alone.
| Week Beginning | RFAs Issued | Total Commitment | RFAs for ME/CFS |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10/24/16 | 10 | $53,40,000 | Zero |
| 10/17/16 | 17 | $94,890,000 | Zero |
| 10/10/16 | 1 | $28,750,00 | Zero |
| 10/3/16 | 9 | $23,087,00 | Zero |
If you want more background on the RFA Ticker, read the inaugural post.
Heh, and even when they’re published, we may not know…
RFAs include the amount of funds available, assuming applications of sufficient quality.
Sorry to be cynical, but funding that has been made available for MECFS… has not always been SPENT on MECFS…
Absolutely true in the past. My analysis 2008-2016 shows that there were no unrelated grants since 2014.
I don’t see how you keep looking at these numbers – so depressing – and publishing them for us.
But thank you – I wouldn’t know otherwise.