The U.S. government's primary biomedical and public health research agency, part of HHS, which funds and conducts medical research and sets related policy.
NIH's SMaHT Network has published its first benchmarking study in Cell, calibrating sequencing methods for rare somatic mutations. The researchers say the methods are more sensitive and specific than before, and call the work foundational for disease studies beyond cancer.
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MIT enrolled nearly 500 fewer graduate students this fall, down 20% from 2024, after federal research awards fell $100 million, its president said. Sally Kornbluth said the school admits cautiously so no Ph.D. student runs out of funding midway.
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NIH put $3.2 billion into basic cystic fibrosis research from 1985 to 2012, an essay in The Conversation reports. Its author warns that grant policies from the Office of Management and Budget could limit similar work.
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NIH is weighing a rule that would replace the averaged 1-to-9 impact score with three bands: top 25%, next 25% and bottom 50%. Critics, including a University of Maryland biologist, say the change would reduce transparency for applicants and the public.
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DOE will invest more than $500 million and Biohub $500 million over five years in open cell data for AI models, under a pact with NIH. Biohub puts the whole effort at $1.8 billion, a total that counts NIH-coordinated datasets built with earlier federal money.
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Meta, Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs put $300 million into Biohub's $1.8 billion Virtual Biology Initiative and get the data before the public does. Startups that sell proprietary cell data will now be priced against a free dataset that their best-funded rivals see first.
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Northwestern scientists traced cannabinoid anxiety in mice to one group of neurons in the amygdala, work reported October 2 in Nature Communications. Silencing those cells left the drugged mice less fearful of a predator odor.
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The order was never published, so the record is a sequence: Vought pushed it at a Friday meeting, the Senate Appropriations chair wrote against it on Tuesday, and by Wednesday one person familiar with the decision called it dead.
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University of Pittsburgh researchers found ADHD carried more than four times the risk of dementia or mild cognitive impairment among 187,000 adults over 50. A matching genetic signal makes misdiagnosis an unlikely explanation, though it does not show that ADHD causes the decline.
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Five Harvard and NIH scientists won the 2026 Warren Alpert Foundation prize for BCL11A work that led to Casgevy, the first CRISPR medicine. The prize honours genetics that took decades to reach patients, at a time when cost and conditioning toxicity limit how many people receive the edit.
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NIH launches a redesigned website on Monday that sorts its information into eight topic hubs, grants among them, instead of by its 27 institutes. Old sites stay up until redirects are in place, so grant seekers will meet the harder test later, as those sites close.
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UCSF researchers found 20 people with depression improved on three symptom scales after cutting ultra-processed food by more than 85%. Participants knew which diet they were eating, so the pilot mainly shows that a bigger trial can be run and does not yet show that the food caused the improvement.
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A team including University of Chicago neuroscientists recorded source, sink and spiral waves of neural activity, and linked different tasks to distinct patterns. The link is an association, so it shows the waves track what the brain is doing and leaves open whether they help direct it.
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Seven of 10 popular IVF add-ons showed little to no effect, or only mixed and low-quality evidence, on live-birth odds in a recent meta-analysis. One US patient who used several of them estimates she has spent close to $200,000 on fertility treatment.
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Harold Hamm gave the University of Oklahoma a record $150 million, with $100 million aimed at training health workers and recruiting researchers. Only a third reaches his diabetes center, so most of the money is a bet on staffing in a state ranked 49th for health care.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told a MAHA Institute event that researchers should not need a gatekeeper's permission to study patient health records. Allies offered Nebraska's exchange as the model, though state consent laws limit such access and the Nebraska deal appears never to have been announced.
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Europe's €500 million Choose Europe for Science package is about 0.3% of the up to $177 billion in US federal grants cut. US researchers' applications to European programmes number in the hundreds, so the talent employers can count today is a small academic intake.
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Weill Cornell biophysicists used cryo-EM to map the pocket where trace amounts of the lipid PIP2 dock onto rod-cell CNG channels and hold them shut. The site is a candidate drug target for inherited retinal degeneration, so far studied only in synthetic membranes.
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The FDA will accept methods other than animal testing for drug and biologic safety determinations when it judges them appropriate, and the agency decides for itself what appropriate means.
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NIH researchers report in Science Translational Medicine that Zika virions form and mature in cell culture using a truncated M fragment plus the envelope protein, without the pr domain and without the host cleavage step.
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