One of the perks of being director of the National Institutes of Health is a pot of money called the Common Fund, which is under the direct control of the agency chief. Francis Collins, the new leader of NIH, announced today that he will spend more then $200 million out of that fund over the next five years on seven programmes in areas ranging from global health to how to speed therapies to the clinic.

The projects will cost $17.8 million in 2010 and then about $50 million in each of the following four years, for a total of $209.5 million. They include a knockout mouse phenotyping programme and the creation of a national Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell Center. Also among them is a collaboration between NIH and the Food and Drug Administration announced yesterday. That effort aims to catalyze drug development by enhancing communication between the two agencies and tackling tough problems in regulatory science.

Details about all seven of the initiatives are available in a slide presentation by Collins (click on slide to the right).

In an interview on Thursday, Collins said that requests for proposals for all seven initiatives will be forthcoming within weeks, to give scientists time to submit proposals that NIH can evaluate before the 2010 fiscal year ends on 30 September.

Funding announcements on two of the projects are already available: one for the Library of Integrated Network-Based Cellular Signatures (LINCS) is viewable here, and the Science of Behavior Change announcement can be seen here. The initiatives “support innovative projects that cross disciplines, diseases and institutes [and] basically empower the entire field,” Collins said.

Asked what might be the payoff for independent scientists funded by NIH’s mainstay R01 grants, he said that the tools the projects develop will save time and money for scientists across biomedical disciplines. “Virtually all of these are going to empower a certain subset of R01 grantees,” he said.

For instance, one of the projects, called the Protein Capture Reagents Program, will develop well-validated, reasonably-priced monoclonal antibodies to help scientists studying how transcription factors turn genes on and off, said Collins. Currently, such antibodies can frustrate scientists because they sometimes target different transcription factors than intended.