National Institutes of Health
National Eye Institute
Minutes of the National Advisory Eye Council
One Hundred Sixty Ninth Meeting
October 11, 2024
The National Advisory Eye Council (NAEC) convened for its 169th meeting at 8:30 a.m. on Friday, October 11, 2024. The meeting was broadcast by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) videocast system, and all observers and participants, including members of the public, attended either virtually or in-person. Michael F. Chiang, MD, Director of the National Eye Institute (NEI), presided as Council Chair, and Kathleen C. Anderson, PhD, served as the Executive Secretary. The meeting was open to the public from 8:30 a.m. until 2:30 p.m. The meeting was closed to the public from 2:40 p.m. until 5:00 p.m. for the review of grant and cooperative agreement applications.
Council Members Present:
Dr. Michael F. Chiang, Chair (in-person)
Dr. Kathleen Anderson, Executive Secretary
(in-person)
Dr. Reza Dana (in-person)
Dr. Maria B. Grant (in-person)
Dr. Maureen Maguire (in-person)
Dr. Tirin Moore (in-person)
Dr. Donald Mutti (in-person)
Dr. Victor Perez Quinones (in-person)
Dr. Pradeep Ramulu (in-person)
NIH Staff Members Present:
Shawn Adolphus (virtual)
Dr. Neeraj Agarwal (in-person)
Dr. Dheeraj Agrohia (virtual)
Lisa Applewhite (in-person)
Mike Arango (virtual)
Dr. Houmam Araj (in-person)
Dr. Sangeeta Bhargava (in-person)
Dr. Kapil Bharti (in-person))
Holly Blake (virtual)
Nathan Brown (in-person)
Dr. Irina Bunea (virtual)
Dr. Rachel Caspi (virtual)
Dr. Emily Chew (in-person)
Faith Chen (virtual)
Dr. Ed Clayton (in-person)
Karen Colbert (in-person)
Wanda Coleman (virtual)
Dr. Mary Francis Cotch (virtual)
Kathryn DeMott in-person)
Britt Dennis (virtual)
Dr. Mela Dutta (virtual)
Dr. Jordan Dworkin (in-person)
Donald Everett (in-person)
Dr. Martha Flanders (in-person)
Dr. Ashley Fortress (in-person)
Ellaine Galindez-Balut (virtual)
Dr. James Gao (in-person)
Alexandra Gavrilovic (in-person)
Dr. Susan Gillmor (virtual)
Kerry Goetz (in-person)
Dr. Nataliya Gordiyenko (in-person)
Dr. Shefa Gordon (virtual)
Dr. Tony Gover (in-person)
Charles Gushue (virtual)
Dr. Anna Han (in-person)
Syed Haqqani (in-person)
Dr. Himide Hardy-Pointer (virtual)
Dustin Hayes (virtual)
Judith Hill (in-person)
Lateefah Hill (in-person)
Dr. Fang Hua, (virtual)
Dan Ignaszewski (in-person)
Dr. Shekhar Jha (virtual)
Dr. Marco Ji (virtual)
Alicia Kerr (in-person)
Dr. Jimmy Le (in-person)
Dr. Paek Lee (in-person)
Dr. Richard Lee (in-person)
Dr. Jung Wha Lee (virtual)
Renee Livshin (virtual)
Rashid Mahdi (virtual)
Natanya Malcolm (virtual)
Alex Manuel (virtual)
Dr. George McKie (in-person)
Dr. Sheldon Miller (virtual)
Mike Moore (virtual)
Erika Nelson (virtual)
Dr. Lisa Neuhold (virtual)
William O’Donnell (virtual)
Dr. Bob O’Hagan (virtual)
Dr. Angelica Ortiz (virtual)
Barbara Payne (virtual)
Melanie Reagan (in-person)
Dr. Mary Ann Redford (virtual)
Amber Reed (virtual)
Holly Russo (virtual)
Dr. Jennifer Schiltz (in-person)
Dr. David Schneeweis (in-person)
Shokrai Wendy (virtual)
Dr. Grace Shen (in-person)
Dr. Azadeh Shoaibi (in-person)
Karen Robinson Smith (in-person)
Dr. Hongman Song (in-person)
Dr. Carolyn Stein (in-person)
Dr. Afia Sultana (virtual)
Dr. Joanna Szczepanik (virtual)
Ginger Tansey (virtual)
Dr. Santa Tumminia (in-person)
Dr. Ehsan Ullah (virtual)
Fausto Vela (virtual)
Dr. Kati Veres (virtual)
Dr. Chenyue Wang (virtual)
Leslie West-Bushby (virtual)
Dr. Cheri Wiggs (in-person)
Bronte Washington-Williams (in-person)
Keturah Williams (virtual)
Dr. Charles Wright (in-person)
Juan Yang (virtual)
Maria Zacharias (virtual)
WELCOME AND INTRODUCTIONS
—Dr. Michael F. Chiang, Chair, NAEC, and Director, NEI
Dr. Chiang called the 169th NAEC meeting to order. He introduced two guest speakers, Dr. Carolyn Stein of the University of California, Berkeley, and Dr. Jordan Dworkin of the Federation of American Scientists. Council members briefly introduced themselves.
COUNCIL PROCEDURES AND RELATED MATTERS
—Dr. Kathleen Anderson, Executive Secretary, NAEC, and Director, Division of Extramural Activities (DEA)
Dr. Anderson welcomed the NEI research and advocacy community, colleagues from the Center for Scientific Review, invited speakers, and members of the public who were in attendance virtually, and thanked staff members who organized the meeting and provided technical support.
She also extended thanks to Dr. Tirin Moore and Dr. Maureen Maguire for agreeing to extend their terms for another meeting as new council members wait to be approved. She thanked Dr. Reza for his service on council for the past three years. She then reviewed best practices for a hybrid meeting.
She noted that future NAEC meetings are listed on the agenda and on the NEI website. The next in-person NAEC meeting will be held on Friday, February 21, 2025. Minutes of the June 2024 NAEC meeting were made available in the electronic council book (ECB) prior to the meeting. A motion to accept the June meeting minutes was made, seconded, and approved unanimously.
Going forward, draft council minutes will be emailed to Council members for approval in advance of the meeting as under a new requirement to have final meeting minutes certified 120 days after the meeting.
NEI DIRECTOR’S REPORT
NEI DIRECTOR’S REPORT —Dr. Michael F. Chiang
Dr. Chiang began by noting the value of social media in disseminating news about scientific and research activities taking place at NIH and NEI. He encouraged attendees to follow NEI’s social media accounts, @NEIDirector and @NatEyeInstitute, on X/Twitter, as well as his LinkedIn account, ChiangMF. Dr. Chiang announced that Drs. Reza Dana, Maureen Maguire, and Tirin Moore would be rotating off the council and thanked them for their service. He noted that several new members will be joining the next meeting.
NIH and NEI and Leadership and Staff Updates
Dr. Chiang noted that Dr. Carolyn Hunter has been named the Director of the Office of Strategic Coordination, which manages the NIH Common Fund. NEI has been doing a lot of activities with the Common Fund, reflecting the cross-disciplinary impact of research in vision.
At NEI, Dr. Chiang introduced two new members of the Division of Extramural Science Programs. Dr. Steven Henley, an AAAS Fellow, will serve as a Program Officer for the glaucoma portfolio, and Dr. Ashley Fortress will serve as a Program Officer for regenerative medicine portfolio.
Dr. Chiang also noted that Dr. Grace Shen, a Program Officer for the retina portfolio, will be retiring in October 2024 after 21 years of service at NEI.
Awards and Recognition
Dr. Chiang congratulated the winners of the Kavli Prize in Neuroscience: Dr. Nancy Kanwisher of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dr. Doris Ying Tsao of the University of California, Berkeley, and Dr. Winrich Freiwald of the Rockefeller University. The trio of NEI-funded researchers were awarded the prize for the discovery of “face areas” in the brain – research conducted over three decades.
Dr. Chiang also congratulated Dr. Rachel O. Wong of the University of Washington, for receiving the 2024 Joram Piatigorsky Basic Science Award for her work on the development and repair of circuits in the vertebrate retina and for giving the lecture at this year’s event.
Awards and Recognition (2)
Dr. Chiang celebrated the achievements of three researchers in the vision research community who were named 2024 Clarivate Citation Laureates: NEI intramural researcher Okihide Hikosaka; Ann M. Graybiel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Wolfram Schultz of the University of Cambridge. This designation is made by the Institute for Scientific Information to researchers whose work has had a major impact in their field and is regarded as a barometer of predicting who might win a Nobel Prize or a Lasker Award. These researchers were recognized for physiological studies of the basal ganglia, central to motor control and behavior, including learning.
Dr. Chiang also lauded NEI intramural investigator Dr. Hendrikje Nienborg, who was recently awarded tenure.
NEI-funded Highlight: Gene therapy for Leber Congenital Amaurosis
Dr. Chiang noted a recent study published in the September 2024 issue of The Lancet in which 15 patients received a subretinal injection of a gene therapy for a form of Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA1) caused by mutations in the guanylyl cyclase 2D gene. The therapy was developed by a drug company called Atsena Therapeutics, and in the trial, patients experienced a 100-1000-fold improvement in their vision with no adverse events. Although the trial was funded by Atsena, it built upon a large foundation of NEI supported research.
NEI-funded Highlight (2): Dry Age-Related Macular Degeneration
Dr. Chiang highlighted a project that identified the gene AKT2 as a potential, new therapeutic target for dry Age-Related Macular Degeneration (AMD). This work was led by Dr. Debasish Sinha at the University of Pittsburgh, along with Dr. Jim Handa at Johns Hopkins University and Dr. Kapil Bharti and Dr. Ruchi Sharma at NEI. Using both a mouse stem cell model as well as an induced pluripotent stem cell-derived retinal pigment epithelium model, they showed that the overexpression of AKT2 leads to lysosome dysfunction and dry AMD. The paper was published in July in Nature Communications.
NEI-funded Highlight (3): Slowing geographic atrophy in AMD
Dr. Chiang also highlighted another study on dry AMD conducted by a team of intramural NEI researchers: Dr. Emily Chew, Dr. Tiaernán Keenan, and Dr. Elvira Agrόn. They re-analyzed retinal images in the Age-Related Eye Disease Studies (AREDS/AREDS2) datasets. The original studies did not account for foveal sparing in the late stages of dry AMD, so in their re-analysis, the team discovered a previously hidden treatment effect in patients taking antioxidant and lutein/zeaxanthin AREDS 2 supplements. In patients taking these supplements the expansion of geographic atrophy toward the central fovea slowed by 55% over three years, helping them preserve their central vision. The study, published online in Ophthalmology in July, supports the continued use of these supplements as a highly effective and cost-effective treatment in patients with late-stage dry AMD.
NIH: Communities Advancing Research Equity (CARE) for Health
Communities Advancing Research Equity (CARE) for Health is an NIH initiative launched this summer that aims to establish a primary care focused research network that integrates research into routine care. The goals of the initiative are to create sustained engagement with communities that are underrepresented in clinical research and to build trust in science among patients as well as primary care clinicians. Dr. Chiang said that CARE for Health recently announced three pilot projects matched to ongoing treatment studies on chronic back pain, drug and alcohol addiction, and gout prevention and treatment. Noting that he serves on the Oversight Committee for the initiative, Dr. Chiang asked how primary care could benefit from more collaboration with the vision community and whether there are studies that could be considered that could bring eye care to the community.
Discussion
Dr. Mutti noted the need for fixing the fragmented state of pediatric vision care, an issue highlighted in a recent National Academies report. Vision screening currently takes place in schools, but there is variation in how states do it, and there is a gap between detection in a school-based environment and the actual delivery of care. How to close this gap and have treatment covered could benefit from further study, he said.
Dr. Maguire pointed out that diabetes is another major public health problem that is very amenable to screening and treatment, particularly with new methods emerging for detecting early disease.
Dr. Ramulu said the suggestions by Dr. Mutti and Dr. Maguire offer direct benefit to participants, but also that the eye has a great capacity to detect systemic disease in ways that may not yet be fully understood. Ongoing research is exploring the link between the eye and conditions involving cognition and neurodegeneration, for example, but it is important to consider the balance between studies that bring direct patient or participant benefit and those that benefit to research, and how to effectively meld the two.
Dr Chiang agreed, adding that primary care in the US is stretched increasingly thinner, so motivating that community to get involved in research may pose some challenges.
Dr. Ramulu noted that two examples to emulate might be a clinical trial currently running in India focusing on improving vision with regard to cognitive outcomes, and a similar effort with a hearing intervention that is embedded within a community-based cohort of primary care deliverers.
NIH Simplified Review Framework
The NIH Simplified Review Framework, a planned change to the grant review process presented to the Council in October 2023, will be going into effect on January 25, 2025, Dr. Chiang said. Currently, grants are evaluated on five review criteria – significance, innovation, approach, investigator, and environment. Changes to the current system aim to focus more on the scientific and technical merit of a proposal and mitigate the effect of reputational bias on the review process. Under this new framework, these five criteria are collapsed into three factors. The first, the importance of research, integrates significance and innovation and addresses whether the project should be done. The second, rigor and feasibility, corresponds to the current third criterion, approach, and addresses whether the project can be done. These two factors will be scored on a 1-9 scale. The third factor is focused on expertise and resources, corresponding to investigator and environment in the current criteria. It will not receive an individual score but is considered when assigning the overall impact score. Dr. Chiang directed questions or comments to Dr. Brian Hoshaw, who chaired the implementation of this effort, and to Dr. Kathleen Anderson. Dr. Anderson noted that the application process will remain unchanged, and that only the review process will undergo these changes.
NIH Updates: Scientific Management Review Board
Dr. Chiang noted that the Scientific Management Review Board, a body within the NIH that has been dormant since 2015, will be meeting on November 14, 2024. The Board consists of nine NIH institute directors and eight community members, most of whom are people in leadership positions at universities. Dr. Chiang will be one of the nine institute directors in attendance.
Dr. Chiang briefly described the history and revival of the SMRB. It was formed as part of the NIH Reform Act, passed in 2006. Its purpose is to advise the Department of Health and Human Services and to advise the NIH on using organizational authorities to establish or abolish institutes within the NIH, to reorganize offices within institutes, and to reorganize within and across institutes at the NIH. Dr. Francis Collins, who served as NIH Director from 2009-2021, felt that the NIH Advisory Committee to the Director could do these tasks more efficiently, so the board has not convened since 2015. Recent Congressional reports (to which Dr. Chiang provided QR codes) have highlighted the need to reform the NIH and improve operations to better support research. Revival of the SMRB was one of the recommendations to this end.
NIH Updates: Statement on Asian Scientists
Dr. Chiang highlighted a statement put out by NIH Director Monica Bertagnolli expressing the agency’s support for Asian Americans, Asian immigrants, and Asian research colleagues.
Driving Innovation: Quantum Sensing and Software
Dr. Chiang described three new Notices of Special Interest (NOFOs). One NOFO, which is due October 24, 2024, and is spearheaded by Dr. Tony Gover, is for small businesses developing quantum sensing technologies for imaging and signal detection in biomedical applications. It is especially aimed at supporting the development of low-cost, portable user-friendly devices that could help stimulate more equitable biomedical data collection The two other NOFOs, due November 4, 2024, and spearheaded by Dr. James Gao, are geared towards creating software for science. Often, software is written for a specific project by a researcher who lacks the time and resources to turn it into a production-quality product, and these NOFOs aim to close that gap. One, called Building Sustainable Software Tools for Science, is an R03 mechanism that supports collaborations between researchers and software engineers to create tools that accord with best practices and design principles. The other, called the NIH Research Software Engineer Award, is an R50 mechanism that provides protected time for software engineers to develop software in the context of existing NIH-funded projects.
Neuroscience: Connectomics, Blueprint
In recent work funded by the BRAIN Initiative, researchers characterized the entire set of 140,000 interconnected neurons and 50 million synapses – the connectome – of the fruit fly. These findings were published in Nature in October in a series of nine papers. Of these, Dr. Chiang said, three papers were directly tied to the visual system, revealing how much impact the visual system has had on neuroscience research overall. Dr. Chiang acknowledged NEI program officers and researchers who work with the BRAIN Initiative.
Dr. Chiang also highlighted the Blueprint Neurotherapeutics Network. This initiative includes two components – one that focuses on biologics (such as gene therapy and antibody or protein therapy) and one that focuses on small molecules. He noted that these programs support several ongoing projects on visual diseases.
Rare Genetic Eye Disease
Dr. Chiang provided an update on the National Ophthalmic Disease Genotyping and Phenotyping Network, also known as eyeGENE. The project was originally developed in 2006 by Dr. Santa Tumminia at NEI and Phase 3 of the project launched last year. Phase 3 launch will include a new accrual protocol that focuses on patient accessibility and involves developing innovative electronic consent forms and mail-in saliva kits for DNA collection.
Dr. Chiang also noted that the National Organization for Albinism and Hypopigmentation for the first time welcomed researchers to its annual conference, held in July 2024. This is traditionally a patient and family meeting, but a group of NEI researchers worked with Verily to enroll patients into eyeGENE. Verily recently developed a new retinal camera for capturing retinal photos. In collaboration with NEI, this camera was used at the meeting to capture retinal photos for the eyeGENE dataset.
Novel Human Biology Models: Complement-ARIE Program
A Common Fund initiative called Complement Animal Research In Experimentation or Complement-ARIE aims to develop, standardize, and validate human-based laboratory or computer approaches for modeling human biology. These New Approach Methodologies (NAMs) include the use of organoids, digital twins, artificial intelligence, and other approaches. NEI’s involvement in this effort has been led by Dr. Martha Flanders. Dr. Chiang noted that three major initiatives are planned: One is an $18 million per year project for establishing NAMs technology development centers; another is a NAMs data hub and coordination center; and the third is a validation and qualification network. Considering that a lot of work in the vision community relies on techniques such as organoids, Dr. Chiang noted there may be ways that vision researchers can take advantage of these opportunities.
Oculomics Common Fund Venture Initiative
Last year, the NIH Common Fund created a Venture Initiative Program to fund 3-year, $15- million projects – smaller in scale than its usual projects. NIH institutes were asked to nominate projects for this program, and Dr. Tony Gover worked with other program officers to develop an initiative called “Oculomics,” which was selected for funding.
Dr. Chiang described the three projects that will be funded under this initiative. One, led by Dr. Amani Fawzu at Northwestern University and Dr. Stephen Burns at Indiana University, aims to develop technology to monitor systemic health by looking at vascular oculomics at a cellular level. Another, led by Dr. Vivek Jay Srinivasan and Dr. Laura Balcer at New York University, will develop next generation optical coherence tomography tools to detect biomarkers of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. A third, led by Dr. Jinahua Wang, Dr. Liang Liang at the University of Miami, and Dr. Yuhua Zhang at the Doheny Eye Institute, aims to develop novel methods to measure blood flow in retinal capillaries to detect cerebral small vessel disease, which contributes to dementia.
Dr. Chiang asked members of the Council for their thoughts on how to better stimulate clinical adoption of new technologies such as OCT-based diagnosis.
Discussion
Dr. Dana noted that as OCT and other technologies evolve, few are getting validated. Even if they are validated scientifically, they may not be validated by the FDA as endpoints in clinical trials. That means it is difficult to adopt metrics based on these technologies into translational research, except at best as secondary endpoints. Therefore, he said, it is important to develop crosstalk and education for regulators about the validation of new technologies.
Dr. Grant said that although the eye-brain connection is very strong, NEI should perhaps also drive connections to a wider range of diseases such as cardiovascular disease, pulmonary disease, diabetes, and sickle cell disease. These diseases are more applicable to a wider base of patients, so she suggested broadening the research program to explore the use of these technologies in identifying biomarkers for systemic diseases. Additionally, Dr. Grant noted that time is an enormous issue in determining whether a tool will make the move from research to clinical practice. For adoption into community clinical practice, the tool’s use must save time rather than take time.
Dr. Perez agreed, noting that in addition to introducing the technology itself, it is crucial to consider recruiting patients, educating clinicians, and expanding to other specialties for which looking at the eye is not second nature. Additionally, he said, the machines themselves are large and expensive. Research initiatives that can develop smaller and less expensive versions of the technology will also be important.
Dr. Ramulu said that he could think of only one success story where OCT was adopted into clinical care – and that is in multiple sclerosis, where OCT has been used as an endpoint in multiple randomized trials. For the technology to be used in areas such as stroke or primary care, it has to move beyond the domain of the ophthalmologist so experts can use it independently, he said.
Dr. Mutti added that if new imaging technologies could be incorporated into existing technologies and be multimodal, that would make time less of a factor for clinicians using them. Also, he noted that validation is key because without it, insurers will not cover these tools. Dr. Maguire concurred with Dr. Mutti’s point that creating multimodal technologies will make it easier for clinical practices in the community to adopt them. The dream would be for a patient to spend 5 minutes in front of a machine that could diagnostically capture markers in the brain, heart, lungs, and eyes.
Dr. Chiang noted that the theme he was taking from the discussion was the need to think beyond the eye and beyond eye doctors using these technologies.
Foster Collaboration: Data Harmonization, Image Privacy
Data harmonization is a major issue in conducting collaborative clinical research. Different electronic health records systems around the country often do not talk to each other because they use different data models. As part of the OHDSI Initiative, NEI researchers set out to develop a common data model to address this problem, running some pilot projects that have enabled pooling data from millions of patients. However, it generally requires an engineer to convert an existing system into that common model, and academic centers often do not have the resources to make it happen. Dr. Chiang described a $1 million challenge launched in September 2024 to fund projects that create a federated vision research network that will enable collaborative research. An ODHSI seminar on health databases will take place on October 30, 2024, Dr. Chiang said.
Privacy is another health data issue. According to health privacy law, removing roughly 20 identifiers such as name, social security number and date of birth de-identifies a medical record. This is a big issue with retinal images because on one hand clinicians seek access to this data for research, but on the other hand there is a risk of people being re-identified based on those images. There is no consensus on whether retinal images are considered protected health information or de-identified.
Dr. Kerry Goetz and Dr. Amber Reed at NEI hosted a panel on August 12, 2024, discussing where the correct operating point should be with the help of multiple thought leaders in the field. Among the conclusions of the meeting was that NEI and the American Academy of Ophthalmology should work together to develop educational initiatives to build trust and clarify some of these misconceptions about retinal image sharing. The American Academy of Ophthalmology Board of Trustees also recently published a statement that said: “A very small risk of re-identifying individuals from de-identified retinal images exists, but the data set has very high value for advancing scientific knowledge.” Dr. Chiang noted that he was concerned that different medical centers may not have the same opinions about these issues, and that leadership from NEI and NIH may be necessary. He invited council members to share thoughts about what they think is needed for NEI/NIH leadership in this area.
Discussion
Dr. Ramulu agreed that NIH and NEI leadership would be very helpful. Another group that should have a seat at the table is institutional review boards, he said. A white paper offering a coherent vision on these issues would ideally lead to some harmonization across different IRBs and institutions, though many would look at things differently, even based on that same recommendation and the same facts, he said.
Dr. Grant noted that one big thing universities pay attention to is funding. Limiting their funding if they do not cooperate could be effective, she said. Dr. Dana said he disagrees because a system that is operationalized by force will not work because people who do not want to collaborate simply will not. Collaboration needs to be organic.
Dr. Chiang noted that his reading of the American Academy of Ophthalmology article was that random 10-digit numbers do not mean much but if those numbers happen to be peoples’ phone numbers they can suddenly be linked with individual identifiers. The paper argued, however, that at the moment retinal images cannot currently be linked with individual identifiers because no database containing that information exists, he said. Also, he added, it argued that people often do not understand the differences between irises and retinas. Iris imaging is easier and is considered PII.
NEI-NIBIB: Enhance All of Us with Ocular Imaging
Dr. Chiang announced a collaboration between NEI, the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, and the All of Us project that will conduct an ancillary study that involves collecting retinal images from 5000 people. Photos and OCTs will be collected at four All of Us sites – two in California, one in New Haven, and one in Chicago. The project is exciting from a research perspective because it aims to identify image-based risk factors and integrate them into All of Us, Dr. Chiang said. But it will also be methodologically important because All of Us does not currently have images in its data set. The study will help establish what we can learn from getting these images into the data set and will also enable the development of best practices for how to store and analyze such data in the cloud, how to standardize image data and metadata, and how to share information back with diverse patient cohorts.
Myopia: NASEM Study Report (Released 9/17/2024)
In September, the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine released its 2024 report on myopia, Dr, Chiang said. The 400-page report was co-sponsored by NEI and a number of other organizations, several of which are in the optometric community. The NEI staff member who led this effort was Dr. Cheri Wiggs, and Dr. Mutti served on the expert panel.
The report made a number of recommendations, Dr. Chiang said. One is to classify myopia as a disease. Another is to recommend 1-2 hours of daily outdoor time for kids because outdoor time stimulates the eye with brighter and more varied light and requires different eye movements and focus compared with indoors. Another recommendation was to develop an integrated national data surveillance system on vision screening, referrals, and demographics. Recommendations specific to NEI include developing a repository for myopia-related data; supporting research in genetic and environmental mechanisms of disease; and supporting research on new treatment strategies and understanding treatment mechanisms.
Dr. Chiang said that NEI is planning a workshop for spring 2025 that follows up on the report. He asked whether Dr. Mutti had anything to add.
Dr. Mutti said the report’s conclusions underscored the prevalence of the disease. The last National Academy report on myopia was more than 30 years ago and it concluded that myopia was very stable over the 20th century, but the environment is very different now. He noted that the consensus opinion explaining the steep rise was the lack of outdoor time in the modern visual diet. There is now an urgent need to better understand basic mechanisms that drive eye growth to develop better treatment strategies. Also, he added, national surveillance efforts in the US are lacking, so what is happening in elementary school children here is unknown.
Dr. Grant asked whether there was enough existing data on light therapy and the need for UV light for proper eye growth to push for recommendations that children have more outside recess time at school.
Dr. Mutti replied that this would be an inexpensive intervention that would receive full-throated support from the committee. He noted that it would be helpful to understand what the biological benefit of outdoor time is. One mechanism identified so far is that brighter light stimulates dopamine release from the retina. However, he noted that the world has moved toward a more indoor environment for particular reasons, and that indoors is a lot more fun than it ever used to be. If the mechanisms were better understood, it could bring them indoors.
Cerebral/Cortical Visual Impairment (CVI)
Dr. Chiang noted several developments in research on CVI. At a recent ARVO Special Interest Group meeting in June 2024, researchers discussed the promise of eye tracking for developing predictive models for who is likely to develop CVI, moving prediction from a qualitative to a quantitative level. NEI is also in the process of building a CVI registry, and an Expert Panel meeting held in June 2024 discussed important details for the registry. Also, a publication forthcoming in December 2024 in Ophthalmology along with an accompanying NEI editorial will establish a working definition of CVI. In parallel, the American Academy of Pediatrics will publish a clinical report in Pediatrics about screening and building awareness for CVI.
Dr. Chiang noted that one of the challenges of CVI is that it is on the border of the eye and the brain, and clinicians of these different specialties often refer patients back and forth between them. Given that there are a lot of medical issues at the eye-brain interface, Dr. Chiang asked the Council whether the vision community should take more ownership of the condition.
Discussion
Dr. Ramulu said they should. At the end of the day, he said, the role of the vision community is in overseeing and optimizing people's vision, and not all problems with vision stem from the eyeball. He noted that issues that affect the brain and muscles and other factors that feed into vision are still more in the domain of vision experts than of other experts.
Collaborate and Educate: Artificial Intelligence
Work integrating AI into precision medicine and multimodal analysis is in process, Dr. Chiang said. Dr Sangeeta Bhargava is spearheading an NEI-led Common Fund program called Precision Medicine with AI: Integrating Imaging with Multimodal Data (PRIMED-AI). The goal is to launch that program in 2026-2027. Also, the Common Fund recently published a Request for Information on this topic. Responses were due in September.
Dr. Kerry Goetz and Dr. Mike Arrango were recently invited to the White House through the Office of Science and Technology Policy for an AI event to give a presentation on the transformational potential of ocular imaging to predict overall health and wellness and increase healthcare access, Dr. Chiang said.
Educate: Seminar Series and Resources
Dr. Chiang provided QR codes to numerous NEI resources: the NEI Intramural Research Seminar Series, the NEI Data Science and Health Informatics Seminar Series; the NEI Grants website, and the NEI Extramural Research Newsletter.
“Recruit Talented and Diverse Individuals”
NEI has created a mentoring program for junior editorial board members who are early career KGrant awardees. The idea is for these junior editors to be mentored by associate editors to help them learn to be better reviewers, Dr. Chiang said, and hopefully to eventually become editorial board members themselves.
Dr. Chiang also gave an update on this year’s Diversity in Vision Research & Ophthalmology summer internships. The program, run by Dr. Cesar Perez-Gonzalez, is designed for students from backgrounds traditionally under-represented in research. Seven students participated this summer. Dr. Chiang provided a QR code to an article NEI put out about the program, which featured DIVRO alum Luke Nelson.
Finally, Dr. Chiang noted that the third annual Eye on the Future video contest for high school students had a great response this year. The students visited the NIH for a lab tour and networking in July and attended a presentation by a panel of researchers from the vision community.
All these initiatives are efforts to bring young people into the field, Dr. Chiang said.
NAEC Budget Update —Ms. Karen Colbert, NEI Budget Officer
Ms. Colbert recapped the current fiscal year and shared her expectations for the new 2025 fiscal year, which began October 1, 2024.
A continuing resolution allows NIH to continue operations through December 20, 2024, and the hope is that once Congress returns after the elections and the Veterans Day holiday, there will be some movement towards establishing appropriations for the year, she said. Until then, funding is held at last fiscal year's level and funds are doled out based on the number of days in the continuing resolution bill. The outcome of the 2024 elections and the subsequent makeup of the next Congress will play a large role in how things look in FY2025, she said.
Ms. Colbert reviewed budget proposals from both the House and the Senate. The House bill leaves NIH funding flat with fiscal year 2024. It reduces ARPA-H funding from $1.5 billion to $500 million. Total 21st Century Cures Act funding is reduced by $280 million from $407 million to $127 million in FY 2025. However, that reduction follows the plan from the original Cures authorization. The $1.28 billion that is freed up from ARPA-H and Cures is repurposed within the NIH budget.
The bill does not give budget levels for Institutes and Centers because it appropriates funding according to an NIH restructuring plan proposed by the House Energy and Commerce Committee. In that plan, only the National Cancer Institute, National Institute of Mental Health, and the new National Institute on Dementia correspond to existing Institutes and Centers. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases would be split into two, and the other Institutes and Centers, along with ARPA-H and the NIH Common Fund, would be merged into seven super-institutes, Ms. Colbert explained.
Meanwhile, the Senate bill proposes $50.224 billion in base discretionary funding for NIH, an increase of $2.05 billion over fiscal year 2024. It also includes $127 million in Cures Act funding for a total of $50.351 billion for NIH. The Senate bill sustains ARPA-H funding at $1.5 billion and restores the All of Us Research Program, the Brain Initiative, and Cancer Moonshot to FY2023 funding levels after being cut in fiscal year 2024.
The House and Senate will come together to reconcile differences in the bills that have passed both chambers, although it is unknown how far they will get before the current continuing resolution expires on December 20. It is likely that there will be additional continuing resolutions until Congress settles on an omnibus or multiple minibus bills to fund the government for the balance of the fiscal year.
Discussion
Dr. Maguire asked how the House Energy and Commerce Committee recommendation mesh with recommendations with respect to reorganizing NIH. Ms. Colbert replied that so far that bill is a recommendation, and that NIH has not yet moved towards implementing it. When the House and Senate come together in conference, they will decide what between the two bills will move forward and what will be tabled until later.
Team Science—Dr. Carolyn Stein, UC Berkeley; Dr. Jordan Dworkin, Federation of American Scientists; Amber Reed, NEI; Dr. Kapil Bharti, NEI
Promoting Team Science for Social Benefit—Dr. Carolyn Stein, UC Berkeley
Dr. Stein discussed incentives in science and how they shape scientists’ behavior, as well as what incentive challenges exist for team science. Dr. Stein studies the economics of science and innovation, and she noted that although economists often see profit as a key motivator in innovation, that is probably not the right way to think about basic research. Much of her work explores what key motivators are at work for research.
Dr. Stein described a 2004 study that addressed this question in postdocs and found that postdocs are willing to accept a 20% cut in salary in exchange for more scientific freedom, suggesting that the enjoyment people get from free inquiry is one powerful motivator. Funding, of course, is another incentive, and a study published in 2020 reported that Requests for Applications (RFAs) put out by the NIH do seem to shift scientists away from what they are currently working on to the topic of the RFA. However, the cost of making this shift is high, so researchers do it when they expect their likelihood of getting funded is high. Finally, Dr. Stein said that in her opinion, the most important incentive in science is credit. She quoted Darwin saying, “My love of natural science has been steady and ardent. This pure love has, however, been much aided by the ambition to be esteemed by my fellow naturalists.” In other words, once a discovery is published, it enters the public domain and is no longer the property of the person who discovered it—and credit for the discovery is the compensation for publication.
The importance of credit generates intense competition. Dr. Stein described her own research addressing credit, competition, and the cost of being scooped. She and colleagues examined the citations of publications associated with proteins deposited in the Protein Data Bank, an open repository of structural information for large molecules such as proteins and nucleic acids. Given two structures of very similar proteins, the one deposited first garners 20% more citations. However, when asked, researchers believe that the “citation penalty” for coming in second is much larger—and that coming in second will lead to 60% fewer citations. The perception probably matters more for behavior than the reality, she said.
That perceived penalty means that researchers prioritize being first, often over the quality of a project. Dr. Stein studied the effect this competition has on science – again, using structural biology as an example, because of the clear and objective measures on quality in this specialty. She and her colleagues found strong evidence that scientists who are working in very competitive areas of structural biology are finishing their projects more quickly, but that their results appear to be of lower quality. Furthermore, it is the more important or higher stakes projects where this effect is strongest. That is not because such projects are more difficult, but because competition prioritizes speed.
Dr. Stein then discussed some challenges around incentives that arise in team science – specifically, how credit is assigned in scientific projects done by large groups. The European Organization for Nuclear Projects (CERN), for example, has rules around authorship and the order of names on a publication. Often, the list is simply alphabetical. That makes sense in the kind of physics conducted at the institution, because papers often have hundreds or even thousands of authors. Such systems make it very difficult to recognize individual contributions, and they leave room for inference about who did what, which allows bias to creep in. One study published in 2021 explored how tenure decisions of men versus women were affected by whether they worked on team projects. The study found that men seem to get tenure at the same rate, whether they work alone or in teams. Women, however, are less likely to get tenure if they work in teams, although that gap closes if most of their work is done alone. The authors surmise that people on a tenure committee implicitly assume that when women work with other people, they are not the main contributors. When they work alone, the committee members do not have to make that inference.
To address this problem, a credit taxonomy developed in 2012 that many journals are adopting enables academics to specify at the end of a paper what each team member contributed. Dr. Stein noted however, that companies seem to have less issue with attributing credit on team projects. She proposed that this is because in research, external credit matters most, but within a company, internal credit suffices because rewards such as promotion and recognition are issued internally. Finding a way to use internal rewards within large research collaborations could help mitigate some of the incentive challenges in team research, she said.
Discussion
Dr. Dana noted that one thing absent from Dr. Stein’s talk was the mention of self-esteem, and he asked whether there are efforts to better understand this dimension of team science. Dr. Stein agreed that this is an important dimension but was unaware of any efforts to measure it.
Dr. Maguire noted that she thought the credit taxonomy was very important, and she wondered how widely it was being used. She also wondered whether the responsibilities listed out in the taxonomy are incorporated in the PubMed listing. Dr. Stein said that some journals have made it mandatory, but others do not require it. She noted that there is some research using data from this credit taxonomy that she will investigate that might address the question.
Dr. Dworkin noted that new research is now looking at self-promotion in how people write about their own research, which relates to the self-esteem element. He appreciated the comparison to firms and internal rewards and asked whether anyone has looked at university or department level awards and honors and how those function for careers compared to external awards and recognition. Dr. Stein agreed that these awards likely function more like inside incentives. Dr. Chiang noted that self-esteem seems to be somehow tied to the metrics we create for determining what is a good researcher.
Mapping the Landscape of Team Science Reforms—Dr. Jordan Dworkin, Federation of American Scientists
Dr. Dworkin’s talk explored how different researchers are proposing ways of rethinking incentives in science as the importance of team science grows. He cited a study from 2007 that showed the rapid growth of team science between 1955 and 2000. Not only were such teams becoming more prevalent and larger, but they also seem to produce a larger share of more impactful papers, patents, and innovations, he said. And some evidence suggests that not only are teams more common, but they are coming to fill a different niche in the scientific ecosystem. That idea is reflected in a 2019 paper, which suggests that smaller teams tend to be more disruptive, whereas larger teams are producing more impactful but also more consolidatory work. Other work points to the career implications of these different niches. A 2024 paper found that in fields where larger teams tend to be more prevalent, junior scientists face some negative career outcomes on average, such as being less likely to secure funding or obtain tenure and are slightly more likely to leave their scientific field, or even science altogether. What is more, these relationships tend to be slightly more pronounced among scientists who are underrepresented – in this case, women and foreign-born scientists.
These results raise the question of how to incentivize and reward the type of collaborative contributions that are necessary to do the kind of science that is best done in teams, Dr. Dworkin said. That might involve making teams more “legible” – that is, making individual contributions more visible and easier to assess. It might also involve creating incentives that are aligned with those contributions. Essentially, he said, the question is how to foster an ecosystem that can efficiently and effectively support a variety of career paths that fill different collaborative roles. Physics publications, for example, can have thousands of authors, but even for papers with a dozen authors, it is important for the rules of authorship to reflect the authors’ different roles. Defining baseline standards for authorship, allowing co-first authorship, and crediting data sources are all ways for adapting norms and incentives to team science. Currently, the H-index is still the most predictive of promotions in science, but new metrics that, for example, decompose individual contribution from the whole team’s contribution on a paper may provide more nuance.
Dr. Dworkin also noted contribution taxonomies as another approach to standardize individual contributions to team projects. Elements like writing, reviewing, and editing are common contributions listed, while software or funding acquisition are more niche contributions to the team. Wider adoption of such an approach could help recognize, value, and make legible the different roles that authors are playing.
Dr. Dworkin noted, however, that even if you make a team legible, it does not mean that people are going to reward the contributions that are important for a team to function. Efforts to address reward structures such as tenure and promotion are also emerging. Two such efforts are the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) and the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (coARA). These are flexible, open ended commitments that institutions make to realign their incentive structures with different models and different priorities. The University of California, Irvine, for example, states that it is strongly committed to creating an academic climate that facilitates and rewards faculty contributions to collaborative scholarship. They define multiple categories of contributions that cover contributing ideas, bringing specific expertise, obtaining funding, or providing project administration.
Dr. Dworkin highlighted the need for efforts to develop accessible and meaningful new metrics beyond the traditional H-index, such as the S-index effort led by NEI (more on that in the next talk). It would also be helpful to find new ways of seeing and valuing mentorship and software creation. Institutional and cultural change will also be crucial for driving adoption of new metrics. The Office of Research Quality at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke has a new program called Sustainable Transformation of Institutional Research Rigor that funds the university or department level initiatives to enhance research rigor and reproducibility.
Dr. Dworkin noted that there are ways to support career paths that have collaborative incentives built into them – for example, with roles like career scientist or research specialist, which involve hands-on science without the administrative and managerial components of running a lab. These kinds of roles could help keep people in academic research, increase institutional knowledge, and facilitate dedicated technical expertise. The National Cancer Institute, for example, has a research specialist award (R50) that provides salary support and autonomy for non-independent investigator scientists to hold stable research careers where they contribute to a team, lab, or department. More broadly, the NIH has such positions for research software engineers and statisticians. Dr. Dworkin noted that there is growing recognition that creating and maintaining software is vital for many scientific projects and that such technical positions increasingly serve foundational roles in team science, especially in the biomedical space. He noted that the United States Research Software Engineer Association has pointed to the value of a core model. That might involve a co-funding model between federal and institutional money that provides an onramp for the position.
Finally, Dr. Dworkin mentioned several new, ambitious, collaborative institutional designs that are emerging and that sit either outside of or in parallel with academic institutions. These designs aim to facilitate a type of coordinated team effort that is difficult in traditional academic career paths and institutions. They vary in how well they scale, but they can raise the profile of collaborative projects and they allow for experimentation within the industry.
Discussion
Dr. Grant asked whether Dr. Dworkin knew of any studies that have looked at the percentage of uploaded data that is actually used by another investigator. Dr. Dworkin said he did not know the answer, but his gut feeling was that it was a low number. Dr. Stein said she had also not heard of such data, but she pointed out that it would be helpful for there to be a way to specifically cite the use of data from other researchers’ work. This could be something indicating, “not only did I use the conclusions of this paper, but I actually used the data they created.”
Dr. Dana noted that during the pandemic, many reporters were mining uploaded data on cohorts of patients receiving varying treatments, though some stories that emerged from this effort were later debunked. Dr. Grant said that in her understanding, even if the data is uploaded and is available, researchers often have to contact the Investigator in order to glean the nuances needed to actually interrogate the data set. The beneficial outcome of uploading all this data was therefore unclear, she said.
Dr. Chiang noted that this question segues nicely to the next talk. He added, however, that if researchers are given the right incentives for presenting a data set that somebody else can use and do something useful with, then they are going to figure out how to do it effectively.
Incentivizing Team Science – The S-Index Challenge— Amber Reed, NEI
Ms. Reed gave her presentation online because her travel was precluded by extreme weather. She began by explaining the notion of challenges, also called prize competitions, as one mechanism, alongside grants, cooperative agreements, contracts, and other types of awards, for stimulating innovation used by the NIH. Challenges offer monetary and sometimes nonmonetary awards to challenge participants, and they enable the public to solve problems presented by federal agencies and to receive awards for the best solutions. She enumerated several reasons for using challenges, including that they stimulate creative and unanticipated solutions to vexing scientific problems, open the search for solutions to people beyond the usual suspects, and bring a diversity of perspectives to a problem. She noted that NIH launched 22 challenges in fiscal year 2024, and two of these were from NEI.
Ms. Reed explained that the S-Index challenge is a $1 million, trans-NIH initiative led by NEI and supported by 16 institutes, centers and offices, and that it aims to incentivize and reward high quality data sharing practices. The idea behind the S-index is inspired by the H-index, a metric used to gauge researchers’ productivity based on their number of publications and the number of times their publications have been cited. The S-index instead focuses on data contributions and reflects the increasing need for open, accessible data to advance research across disciplines. The S-index aims to provide a simple yet measurable way to track and reward effective data sharing.
The challenge is open to the public and has three categories of registration: Individuals; teams consisting of a group of individuals competing on behalf of themselves; and entities, which consist of a group of people competing on behalf of a legally established organization, institution, or corporation. Team captains must be US citizens and entities must be US-based. She noted that interested parties must register their intent to participate by March 3, 2025.
Discussion
Dr. Dana asked how this index is measured, and how H-index is translated to this index. Dr. Reed invited Dr. Chiang, who came up with the idea, to address the question. She noted, though, that finalists in the challenge would be invited to test their proposal against a dataset that would be provided.
Dr. Chiang explained that the S-index does not yet exist, and its parameters will be defined by participants in the challenge. The similarity to the H-index is simply that it is a metric associated with an individual researcher. S-index will reflect data sharing in a parallel way to how the Hindex reflects citations, he said. The more data that you share that is useful for other people to produce results, the higher your S index, However, it remains for participants in the challenge to define how to measure sharing, “good” data, and the way it gets used.
Dr. Mutti asked Ms. Reed to clarify the aim of the S-Index Challenge. Ms. Reed explained that the aim was to incentivize people to come up with an effective metric for data sharing and to spur innovation in how people think about this issue. Dr. Chiang added that a paper published about 15 years ago described the H-index, and the hope is that the challenge will stimulate a similarly detailed definition of an S-index.
Dr. Kerry Goetz said that the S-index is meant to model not a data set’s value, but a researcher’s contribution toward making that data set useful. She added that the people often charged with doing the hard work of sharing the data from a project are not the people who are first and last authors, so it is important to create incentives as well as avenues for recognition and citation for them.
Translating Human Retinal Epithelium (RPE) Biology into Disease Treatments using induced Pluripotent Stem Cells (iPSCs)—Dr. Kapil Bharti, NEI
Dr. Bharti described a translational team science project in his laboratory that involved developing an RPE patch for patients with late stage dry age-related macular degeneration (AMD). Scientists in his lab and collaborators conducted the work over the course of a decade, and it involved expertise across multiple scientific disciplines and types of expertise, from cell biology and bioengineering to GMP manufacturing and regulatory science. When Dr. Bharti’s team began the project, the idea of using RPE cells to treat dry AMD was not new, and several similar stem cell efforts had been attempted in the clinic. This project differed in that it aimed to use iPSCs that were autologous – that is, made from a specific patient’s own cells – and that the iPSCs would be made using a slightly different protocol and transplanted in a biodegradable scaffold. These differences were intended to make the cells integrate better and faster into the eye.
The catalyzing event for the project was a $10 million, four-year grant that required milestones to be achieved each year. Dr. Bharti said that as Dr. Stein and Dr. Dworkin had discussed in their talks, the scientists who worked on the project – mostly postdoctoral fellows, as well as some students and technical staff – had different incentives for participating, including a big publication, career advancement, or even a springboard to a different career path. The project began with a few scientists thinking about developmental biology and making stem cells into RPEs but blossomed into many components. Clinical colleagues developed a protocol and recruited patients, and different groups of scientists created and optimized the RPE scaffold, developed an animal model to test the system, and regulatory experts oversaw the submission of the work to the FDA to enable a clinical trial, which is currently ongoing.
Dr. Bharti said that the work, which was led to a large extent by Dr. Ruchi Sharma, was enabled by a key discovery about how transcription factors regulate the differentiation of the RPE. The RPE stem cell protocol, which was developed by multiple scientists in the lab along with Dr. Sharma, has been reproduced hundreds of times in the lab and beyond. Currently, over two dozen labs across the world and half a dozen companies are using it, Dr. Bharti said. Dr. Sharma coauthored the publication describing the protocol with scientists from Johns Hopkins as well as the University of Pittsburgh, underscoring the fact that the project has enabled many collaborations. It took almost a year to pin down how to grow RPE on the scaffold – a process that also involved the expertise of multiple scientists in the lab.
The bioengineering component of the work spurred scientists in the lab to apply for an NIH Director’s Innovation Award, which was used to robotize the process. Two other scientists on the team developed a method of characterizing RPE cells to determine whether they were mature enough to go into patients by using an artificial intelligence-based matrix to quantify images of RPE cells. Transforming the lab protocol into a GMP protocol was also a major task, as was the regulatory science aspect and the animal model development, Dr. Bharti said. As lab members and collaborators leaned into the work, they gained expertise that often substantially changed the trajectory of their careers. Dr. Bharti also noted that many people worked behind the scenes to make the project happen. Administrative staff members provided invaluable support in purchasing equipment and materials and in helping produce and update the 12,410-page-long investigational new drug (IND) application for the FDA for the Phase I/IIa clinical trial. Tech transfer officers also helped navigate relationships with industry. Dr. Bharti described the contributions of many people who were instrumental in catalyzing the project, as well as a larger list of people who contributed to the IND submission.
Discussion
Dr. Maguire asked Dr. Bharti about his role as the leader and how he went about assembling the team. She also asked what motivated people to stay with the team even though they might not be getting publications, large salaries, or external recognition.
Dr. Bharti replied that his role was primarily to listen to the people he had brought on and to trust their expertise—and to embrace the fact that everyone was extremely dedicated and was doing their best even when things were not working. He recalled a period when they were having difficulty with the GMP protocol, and how one late Friday evening after a period of frustration he sent the team home, telling them they would all return to the problem on Monday. But on Saturday morning his lab members emailed him because they had come in to troubleshoot the problem and had identified the solution. “I think the motivation for them was that they saw that there was something big here, they saw that they could change the world,” he said.
General Team Science Discussion
Dr. Chiang began the discussion by noting that when he began his first assistant professor job, he was told his job was to write papers and get tenure, and he now questions whether having lots of individual scientists engaged in writing papers and getting tenure was the way to enable groundbreaking innovations in science.
As an institute director at the NIH, he feels fortunate to be in a position of trying to effect cultural change in enabling more of a team science approach, and NEI has taken something of a leadership role in this effort, he said.
Dr. Mutti noted that for team science to be successful, external credit and internal motivation are important, but there are also practical considerations such as jobs, promotion, and salary. He asked Dr. Bharti whether there was some form of recognition or support structure that enabled people on his team to land on their feet after the project ended.
Dr. Bharti said that most of his team consisted of early career scientists, and that when they started this project in 2014 or 2015, there was nothing in place – just the hope that that work would yield papers, which it did. He noted that he made sure to acknowledge authorship in ways everyone agreed to, often with multiple first authors on a paper. Team members were able to take advantage of opportunities to take their careers in new and unexpected directions. Now, however, the lab is trying to put more formal processes around team science in place. The biggest challenge, he added, was in building incentives for technical staff, since citations do not necessarily help them advance their careers. So, they are less motivated by the promise of credit for the work and more motivated by salary, which is often significantly higher in industry.
Dr. Mutti suggested that a sports team offers an analogy to doing team science. Academia expects everybody to eventually be a team captain that leads projects, he said. But team participation may be difficult in academia, unless it is okay to be recognized as a really great team member, and perhaps not necessarily a team captain. Dr. Chiang asked whether Dr. Stein and Dr. Dworkin had thoughts about how best to shift the culture toward incentivizing discovery, rather than incentivizing being the captain.
Dr. Dworkin referred to a study he mentioned briefly in his talk, which tried to create an impact measure that disentangled into individual contributions from broader team contributions. But he noted that as long as citations are being measured, the team’s impact will be attributed to the more senior scientists on the team because on average the papers they are on will be more highly cited. Another approach may be to track careers – where members of a particular team end up, how they function, and how they felt on the team. There are mechanisms in place for following people who end up in academia, and that may bias our understanding of how teams function towards team members who are predisposed to end up as PIs, he said. Compiling more robust data sets within government may show more variability. Better understanding how scientists grow in their career within their performance on an individual team may be insightful, he said.
Dr. Stein noted that basketball has a team metric called “adjusted plus-minus” that tracks how a team scores points when a given player is in or out of the game. It may be possible to come up with a similar metric for labs, based on authorship, she said. However, a challenging aspect of science is that there is a high degree of randomness regarding whether or not a project is successful, and it is important that such a metric not encourage people to preferentially work on less risky projects. Another avenue to explore, she said, may be making more use of soft information about a person’s performance as a team player by codifying things like systematic performance reviews and making sure people are recognized and rewarded for excelling in this realm.
Dr. Ramulu said he appreciated Dr. Stein’s comment in her talk about decreasing the importance of external credit, and it gets to Dr. Dana’s earlier comment on self-esteem and success. He cautioned that there was potentially some backwards logic in the notion of quantifying discovery.
Dr. Dana noted that an established PI probably already knows who their best team players are – and the equations and numbers proving it may not be necessary. He noted that there is currently so much available data and analysis that there is perhaps a misguided idea that doing more analysis will yield something closer to the truth. There is something to be said for holistic evaluations, he said – though the question is how to incorporate them into research methodology. He cautioned that for the output of any metric to be worthwhile, it was crucial to carefully define things like quality, importance, or impact.
Dr. Moore noted that the sports analogy is not very appropriate because the team is the frontfacing entity and the primary energy within sports, whereas in science it is the PI. He also noted that the H-index already does to some extent incentivize teamwork.
Dr. Grant asked for clarification about whether R50 grants were open to people throughout NIH or just within NCI. She noted her support for a mechanism for supporting scientists that were not PIs, but that were making major contributions to a team of scientists and giving them an incentive to stay in science rather than moving to industry or leaving entirely.
Dr. Dworkin replied that that these grants are indeed a great model, but to his knowledge only the NCI uses them to support a senior scientist who has an open-ended contribution to the team. Other institutes use them as a research software engineer award. Regardless, these types of mechanisms allow team players a path forward in a lab. Dr. Chiang said he first heard about the award in a talk at a university. Faculty were discussing the lack of a pathway for staff scientists at their institution, and the NCI R50 was mentioned. He noted that NEI has looked into it and plans to discuss it further. Dr. Maguire noted that the closest NEI has is the core grants to support positions like machine shop staff, statisticians, or imagers – whatever needs can support the vision research community.
Dr. Mutti asked how to handle the intellectual property and whether it was an impediment to innovative team science. Dr. Bharti replied that his approach has been to be as inclusive as possible. Often a person comes up with an idea based on a discussion held by multiple team members, so he believes that whoever is on the team should be a part of the intellectual property, and the lawyers can figure it out later if need be.
Dr. Perez noted that social media is very powerful, and it can help provide exposure to research. He noted that Dr. Chiang was particularly adept at its use and asked for thoughts about wielding it effectively. Dr. Stein noted that she had to take herself off Twitter because she found it stressful, though she sees other people use it effectively to disseminate and promote their work.
Concept Clearance: NEI Product Assistance Center—Dr. Tony Gover, NEI
The goal of this concept is to create a product assistance center that would support NEI investigators, either from industry or academia, to develop regulated medical products that diagnose and treat diseases and disorders of the visual system, Dr. Gover said. The center would provide in-kind consultant services for product development activities prior to or during NEIfunded translational research efforts. It would be created through a contract directly through the NIH.
Dr. Gover laid out the need for such support for the vision research community. Although NEI receives hundreds of applied research grants each year, very few are for translational research. The applications for translational research that do come in tend to do poorly at study section. Proposed translational projects fail for multiple reasons. They often have weak regulatory and commercialization strategies or do not fully address Chemistry Manufacturing and Controls requirements. They often raise concerns over identifying appropriate contract research organizations and manufacturers. They are also often weak on intellectual property (IP), either due to a lack of freedom to operate, a lack of IP in general, or poorly defined pathways to commercialization. That is why it is critical for NEI to support investigators early in the product development pipeline by providing in-kind services to address these product development issues, Dr. Gover said.
The proposed NEI Product Assistance Center contractor will provide in-kind consultant services including support for any product development activity that would be required for a successful transitional research effort, Dr. Gover said. He noted that providing this service should increase the number and quality of translational research applications NEI receives, and ultimately, it will increase the number of products that enter the marketplace and impact the lives of patients.
Discussion
The assigned discussants for this concept clearance were Dr. Mutti and Dr. Maguire.
Dr. Reza commended NEI, Dr. Chiang, and Dr. Gover for championing translational research, and asked how researchers could obtain the support from the proposed center. Dr. Gover said that researchers would submit a letter requesting assistance to the NEI, upon which NEI program officers would vet the project. To be eligible it would have to meet the mission of NEI and the priorities of one of NEI’s portfolios. The team’s technology would have to be at the right readiness level, and the intent of the work would have to be translation, he said. For successfully vetted submissions, access to the center would be on a first come first served basis, Dr. Gover said.
Dr. Mutti said he sees a tremendous need for this type of support as a way of getting more products to commercialization. He also noted that universities are not always as helpful as they could be with tech transfer issues. Dr. Maguire agreed with the need for this program and asked whether other institutes have similar programs, and if so, what their experience with them has been. Dr. Gover replied that NEI is a part of the NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience Research, and that within that program, researchers who are funded receive such in-kind services. So far that includes one or two NEI projects, but the aim is to provide this support more broadly. Additionally, Dr. Gover said that other institutes and centers and other parts of the federal government often use this type of mechanism for product development efforts, and it generally works well.
Dr. Maguire noted that the types of services this program provides would also be useful for projects at the clinical trials stage, and she asked whether these were eligible. Dr. Gover said they were. Dr. Maguire also asked why the language states that the contractor work cannot be used to develop federal government applications. Dr. Gover explained that the PI must own the application and is totally responsible for it. The consultant would not be writing the application for the PI, but would, for example, help the PI develop a clinical trial protocol for their submission.
Dr. Mutti asked how this service could help PIs navigate intellectual property issues. Dr. Gover said that applicants often do a poor job thinking through those issues, so consultants would help them determine whether they have freedom to operate or secure their IP, for example, and generally help them navigate the IP landscape.
Dr. Perez also commended Dr. Gover on his work on translational medicine. He asked how early in the application process researchers should reach out. He also asked whether the center would provide assistance in developing the infrastructure for a startup, for example in terms of contracts or license agreements. Dr. Gover said the best time to reach out is as early as possible in an applied research project. The center would act as a general contractor and would connect the researcher with specific expertise (e.g. legal or IP) as needed. But he noted that the service provided would be consultation – so the contractors could only provide advice and opinion on things like licensing agreements because the IP would be owned by the university.
Dr. Anderson asked for a motion to approve this concept, which passed unanimously.
BRAIN Multi-Council Working Group Update—Dr. Tirin Moore, NEI
Dr. Moore, NEI’s representative on the BRAIN Multi-Council Working Group, summarized the group’s council meeting held on August 22, 2024. BRAIN director Dr. John Ngai began the meeting by acknowledging staff members and contributors at different institutes, as well as outgoing and new council members. He then highlighted some recent news from BRAIN investigators, including the Kavli Prize in Neuroscience. As mentioned in Dr. Chiang’s Director’s Report, all three awardees have long been supported by the NEI.
Dr. Moore recounted that Dr. Ngai also noted a series of articles that highlight a decade of work by the BRAIN initiative and resulted in a full map of the neural connections of the fruit fly, which will advance understanding of brain processing in larger animals. He also noted that the 10th annual BRAIN Initiative conference was held this summer and that it included networking opportunities for trainees as well as a panel discussion including former NIH director Francis Collins and early architects of the BRAIN Initiative. Dr. Ngai also briefly discussed the BRAIN Initiative’s budget, which was decreased by $280 million in FY2024.
The BRAIN director then highlighted efforts to enhance community engagement, including a briefing in front of the Congressional Neuroscience Caucus in April and a lecture series in May at Oregon Health Sciences University to celebrate the contributions of Earl Blumenauer, who was the co-chair and founder of the Congressional Neuroscience Caucus. BRAIN recently signed on to the NIH Blueprint’s ENDURE program, an R25 that seeks to bring undergraduate students into neuroscience. He also noted an upcoming Funding Opportunity aimed at promoting equity by disseminating novel neuroscience tools to underserved labs and universities. The director then summarized some recent highlights in BRAIN Initiative-funded science. This included work related to a project called the Armamentarium for Precise Brain Cell Access, which aims to leverage emerging information about cell types, their molecular or circuit properties, and other features to pin down how those cells interact to give rise to behavior. It also included a project in which high density single neuron recordings in interoperative human patients aimed to map language comprehension in the brain in real time. Finally, the leader of the Neuroethics Working Group gave an update on the group’s work. They highlighted a recent meeting at which participants discussed how the intersection of AI neuroscience and ethics raises potential issues relating to informed consent, privacy, confidentiality, and equity of care.
The BRAIN Multi-council Workgroup meeting was recorded and can be viewed here.
Retiring Council Member Remarks
Dr. Reza Dana gave a brief statement about his time on Council to mark the end of his tenure. He thanked his colleagues for the honor and privilege of working with them and for the opportunity to see how NEI operates from the program side. He offered one cautionary note to the Council – that blindness as a public health issue is very complex, with biological, social and economic components that cannot always be solved. It is important to acknowledge, he said, that it is impossible to do everything, especially in a time of limited resources. Rather, he said, it is crucial to be extremely selective in thinking about how to allocate those resources. He lauded Dr. Chaing’s leadership and his capacity to engage with people and issues and to question things. Dr. Chiang responded that working with Dr. Dana on the Council has been a great experience and that he greatly appreciated the perspective that Dr. Dana added. Dr. Chiang noted that he was especially grateful for his candor in council meetings, conveying what he thought the council needed to hear rather than what they wanted to hear.
General Discussion
Dr. Mutti kicked off the general discussion with thoughts about changing attitudes to team science. He noted that he does not remember many experiences in school where group work was encouraged, but today it seems much more prevalent in education. He wondered whether this may be a generational change that is partly responsible for driving the growth of team science.
Dr. Stein responded that even since she was in graduate school she has observed a large jump in how commonly people in her field, economics, collaborate. Previously, it was common for graduate students to author a solo paper and take it on the job market, but now graduate students often write joint papers. That could be because of childhood conditioning, she said, but it could also be because science is getting more specialized, making it more valuable and necessary to work in teams to bridge different areas of expertise.
Dr. Maguire brought up the prospect of making motivational interviews available that would convey the benefits of working in research. She noted that there is much talk about the negative side of doing science – the difficulty of getting grants and landing positions, the lack of funding, and the demands of committee meetings. However, she said, there is not enough emphasis on the benefits of working with wonderful colleagues, and the excitement of bouncing ideas off smart and insightful people with expertise that is different but relevant to your own. The positives need to be more strongly conveyed to demonstrate the value to young people of choosing scientific research as a profession.
Returning to the topic of how much things have changed, Dr. Dana noted that the pandemic has created new dynamics in how we engage with technology and with each other. His lab had a very robust weekly lab meeting that was disrupted by the pandemic and has only now returned to normal; people seem much less willing to engage in person, he said. On one hand, technology is enabling connection at an unprecedented level, and on the other, it has created an enormous amount of noise, he said, and finding the sweet spot is a challenge.
Dr. Moore asked why it might be that young scientists are more open to collaborating. Dr. Stein speculated that the urge to work together may be a natural response to training times getting longer. People used to do their PhDs in 4 years and emerge on the job market with a publication, but now that time is stretching to 5 or 6 years or more. It is so difficult to have all the tools now for one person to produce a paper on the cutting edge of the field, that trainees are realizing that working together and pooling talents improves their research, she said.
Dr. Perez changed the topic of the discussion, noting that negativity and worries were swirling around pending legislation on NIH reform, but added that he was glad Dr. Chiang was on committees addressing the issue. He asked what he and his colleagues on the Council could tell extramural researchers who asked about the process. He also asked how Council members might help Dr. Chiang.
Dr. Chiang explained that he was not able to offer any opinions about pending legislation and he could not tell people what to say. However, he said, he can encourage Council members to talk about the impacts of the work at NEI and to share their opinions.
One reason that enthusiasm for academic science careers is flagging among young trainees may be that they are spending less time than past generations traveling to scientific meetings and engaging with colleagues about research, Dr. Grant said. She reflected on the fact that these days, the amount of travel that scientists can do has greatly diminished due to economic factors. Researchers might instead attend one large meeting per year, but conferences like ARVO can be overwhelming for students and early career scientists. She wondered whether NEI might be able to provide resources for smaller, niche meetings on specific topics, where researchers at different stages of their careers can engage in a more intimate and inspiring setting.
Dr. Chiang noted that the issue of negativity towards science and medicine had surfaced multiple times over the course of the day. That salary is one reason for current levels of disillusionment, and various types of uncompensated work is another. He agreed that for the field to thrive, it is crucial to counter that negativity.
Early in his career, he said, he often brought his kids to work with him so they could see how much he loved his job. Recently, he said, a mid-career scientist told him that when they saw their mentors expressing annoyance and complaining about so many aspects of their professional life, they felt disincentivized to follow in these mentors’ footsteps. Maybe we need to focus on that positivity and identify spokespeople who can speak about research in an inspiring way, he said.
He noted that the NIH creates educational YouTube videos, and that many get perhaps 50 views, but occasionally one gets 500,000 views because the speaker is so motivational, interesting, and fun to listen to. He wondered how to find these 500,000-view people in the vision community, and how to bring people together in a way that is useful for scientists and inspirational for younger people.
Dr. Chiang then invited NEI’s Dr. Houmam Araj to speak on the R13 conference grant mechanism. Dr. Araj explained that NEI has a very active R13 conference mechanism, and he noted that leadership has been supportive of using this mechanism for supporting conferences relevant to the mission of the NEI. He encouraged anyone with ideas for conferences that could receive R13 funding to reach out to him.
Dr. Anderson added that NEI cannot support all the costs associated with conferences but prioritizes supporting travel costs for trainees to attend conferences.
Next, Dr. Chiang asked Dr. Stein to describe the Journal of Economic Perspectives, which she had mentioned during lunch. Dr. Stein said that the journal was started by the American Economic Association, the governing body of the field of economics. It is an unusual journal in that the articles are not peer-reviewed, she explained. The journal looks for growing areas of interest and solicits the leaders of those research areas to produce an article that is not quite a review article, but a synthesis of the literature written almost like excellent lecture notes for an upper-level undergraduate class. Dr. Stein said she considers these articles a gift to the field and seeks them out when she is exploring a new topic.
Dr. Chiang said one reason he was interested in hearing about this publication is that NEI has been thinking about how best to publicize what the agency does to a general audience.
Dr. Ramulu noted that NEI is the engine that makes a lot of research run. Other organizations benefit from that and publicize the work they do through the NEI. He asked Dr. Chiang to what extent he feels NEI needs to advertise what it does, and to what extent he feels it does not need that level of external validation. He also asked what NEI gains by people recognizing that it is funding the work it funds.
Dr. Chaing responded that this is a multi-pronged issue. One reason is to motivate the best people to get into the field, he said – specifically, young researchers mapping their career paths. Many of the problems and questions in vision research would benefit from a multidisciplinary approach, and lots of people working in eye departments are not vision researchers, per se, but cell biologists, bioengineers, or computational scientists, for example. He added that the agency gets attention by showing they do important work that matters to the American public, so it is important to communicate this.
Asked to weigh in, Dr. Tumminia added that one of NEI’s roles is to educate the American public, and given the lack of trust in science, it is crucial to do a better job explaining what problems NEI researchers are addressing. She noted that scientists are good at talking about their work to other experts but fall short in speaking with the nonscientists in their lives.
Dr. Ramulu noted he appreciates the context this discussion added to the idea of the videos Dr. Chiang mentioned – which sometimes get 50 views but occasionally get 50,000. Dr. Ramulu returned to Dr. Chiang’s question earlier in the meeting about whether the vision community should be more involved in CVI and conditions that may be generated in the brain rather than the eye. He said he had looked back at NEI’s mission, which includes improving people’s quality of life and eliminating vision loss. People with CVI do have vision loss so it is very appropriate, in his opinion, for NEI to take it on, he said.
Dr. Perez noted that the Department of Defense has done a great job with traumatic brain injury, in particular. These patients do present with quality-of-life issues including ocular symptoms and pain so it is something that NEI should be involved with and should continue to expand.
As the discussion wrapped up, Dr. Anderson and Dr. Chiang asked attendees to get in touch with any ideas they might have about topics that could be addressed at future meetings. Dr. Chiang expressed appreciation toward the speakers who had addressed team science, and he noted that NEI was in a position to do something about this topic. He adjourned the meeting and said that the closed portion would continue after a 10-minute break.
The open session of the meeting was adjourned at 2:25 pm.
CLOSED SESSION
This portion of the meeting was closed to the public in accordance with the determination that this session concerned matters exempt from mandatory disclosure under Sections 552b(c)(4) and 552b(c)(6), Title 5, U.S. Code, and Section 1009(d) of the Federal Advisory Committee Act, as amended (5 U.S.C. §§ 1001-1014). Members absented themselves from the meeting during discussion of and voting on applications from their own institutions or other applications in which there was a potential conflict of interest, real or apparent. Members were asked to sign a statement to this effect.
REVIEW OF APPLICATIONS
NAEC members considered 541 grant and cooperative agreement applications on which NEI was the primary Institute; these applications requested a total of $300,135,919 (direct costs year 01). The Council also considered 214 applications on which another Institute/Center was primary and NEI was secondary. These applications requested a total of $164,132,559 (direct costs year 01). The Council concurred with the Institutional Review Group recommendations on these 755 applications.
ADJOURNMENT
The 169th meeting of the National Advisory Eye Council was adjourned at 5:00 p.m. on October 11, 2024.
CLOSED SESSION ATTENDEES
Council Members Present:
Dr. Michael F. Chiang, Chair (in-person)
Dr. Kathleen Anderson, Executive Secretary (in-person)
Dr. Reza Dana (in-person)
Dr. Maria B. Grant (in-person)
Dr. Maureen Maguire (virtual)
Dr. Tirin Moore (in-person)
Dr. Donald Mutti (in-person)
Dr. Victor Perez Quinones (in-person)
Dr. Pradeep Ramulu (in-person)
NIH Staff Members Present:
Shawn Adolphus (virtual)
Dr. Neeraj Agarwal (in-person)
Lisa Applewhite (in-person)
Dr. Houmam Araj (in-person)
Nathan Brown (in-person)
Dr. Sangeeta Bhargava (in-person)
Nathan Brown (in-person)
Dr. Ed Clayton (in-person)
Donald Everett (in-person)
Dr. Martha Flanders (in-person)
Dr. Ashley Fortress (in-person)
Dr. James Gao (in-person)
Alexandra Gavrilovic (in-person)
Dr. Nataliya Gordiyenko (in-person)
Dr. Shefa Gordon (virtual)
Dr. Tony Gover (in-person)
Dr. Steve Henle (in-person)
Lateefah Hill (in-person)
Dr. Brian Hoshaw (virtual)
Alicia Kerr (in-person)
Dr. Jimmy Le (in-person)
Dr. Paek Lee (in-person)
Dr. Barbara Mallon (virtual)
Dr. George McKie (in-person)
Dr. Mary Ann Redford (virtual)
Dr. Jennifer Schiltz (in-person)
Dr. Grace Shen (in-person)
Karen Robinson Smith (in-person)
Dr. Hongman Song (in-person)
Dr. Afia Sultana (virtual)
Dr. Joanna Szczepanik (virtual)
Dr. Santa Tumminia (in-person)
Dr. Cheri Wiggs (in-person)
Bronte Williams-Washington (in-person)
Keturah Williams (in-person)
Dr. Charles Wright (in-person)
CERTIFICATION
These minutes were submitted for the approval of the Council. All corrections or notations were incorporated. We hereby certify that, to the best of our knowledge, the foregoing minutes and attachment(s) are accurate and complete.
______________________________________
Michael F. Chiang, MD
Chair
National Advisory Eye Council
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Kathleen C. Anderson, PhD
Executive Secretary
National Advisory Eye Council
NIH Simplified Review Framework
The NIH Simplified Review Framework