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ASH Directions
ASH Announces Fifth Round of
“Bridge Funding” Recipients
Eleven new blood disease researchers
have been selected as the latest recipients
of the American Society of Hematology’s
Bridge Grants.
These one-year, $150,000 awards are
designed to provide critical interim support for hematology research proposals
that, despite earning high scores, could
not be funded by the National Institutes of
Health (NIH) due to severe funding reductions. The 11 ASH Bridge Grant recipients
announced in April 2015 join the list of 51
hematologists who have received funding
since ASH committed $9 million in Society
funds to create the program in 2012.
Over the last decade or more, funding for NIH has steadily declined. In
2013, across-the-board cuts to the NIH
budget further hurt the agency’s ability
to fund research proposals, leading to a
decrease in available funds for hematologists conducting critical blood disease
research. Despite slight gains over the last
several years, the funding outlook for NIH
and NIH-supported researchers remains
bleak, and NIH’s ability to sustain current
research capacity and encourage promising new areas of science is significantly
limited. This challenging environment
has led to vigorous competition for NIH
research project grant (R01) awards, preventing many meritorious projects from
receiving vital financial support.
In an effort to preserve hematology
research amid continued budget austerity,
the ASH Bridge Grant program provides
supplemental funding to investigators to
help them sustain their laboratories and
staff in order to gather additional data and
ultimately obtain an NIH grant.
“After a decade of flat funding for NIH,
sequestration-related cuts, and now a great
deal of uncertainty for NIH amid ongoing
congressional budget negotiations, the need
“ e simply cannot afford to allow
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these detrimental spending cuts
to halt the progress of talented
investigators.” —DAVID A. WILLIAMS, MD
Trainees Collaborate with Mentors,
Learn Best Practices at the 2015
ASH Clinical Research Training
Institute in Latin America
ASH was proud to host
10 hematologists selected
to participate in the third
ASH Clinical Research
Training Institute in Latin
America (CRTI-LA). This
education and mentorship program, held April
21-22, 2015, in Cartagena,
Colombia, prior to the Society’s Highlights of ASH®
meeting in Latin America,
is designed to prepare current hematology and hematology/oncology fellows
and junior faculty working in Latin America for
careers in patient-oriented
ASHClinicalNews.org
clinical research.
During the two-day
program, CRTI-LA participants attended lectures
and small-group breakout
sessions facilitated by international experts to explore
topics such as research
questions, clinical trial design, biostatistics, and how
to write an abstract and
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