 Since 2008, Josephine Briggs, MD, has served as director of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) at the National Institutes of Health. A graduate of Harvard-Radcliffe College and Harvard Medical School, she completed her residency training in internal medicine and nephrology at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, NY, where she was also chief resident in the Department of Internal Medicine and a fellow in clinical nephrology. She then held a research fellowship in physiology at Yale School of Medicine. After completing her fellowship at Yale, Dr. Briggs was a research scientist for 7 years at the Physiology Institute at the University of Munich in Germany.
In 1985, Dr. Briggs moved to the University of Michigan where she held several academic positions, including associate chair for research in the Department of Internal Medicine and professorships in the Division of Nephrology, Department of Internal Medicine and the Department of Physiology. Dr. Briggs joined the National Institutes of Health in 1997 as director of the Division of Kidney, Urologic, and Hematologic Diseases at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases where she oversaw extramural research activities. While at NIDDK, she co-chaired an NIH Roadmap Committee on Translational Core Resources.
Dr. Briggs’ research interests include the renin-angiotensin system, diabetic nephropathy, circadian regulation of blood pressure, and the effect of antioxidants in kidney disease. She has published more than 130 research articles, has served on the editorial boards of several journals and was deputy editor for the Journal of Clinical Investigation. She is an elected member of the American Association of Physicians and the American Society of Clinical Investigation and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
What is the mission of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine?
It is to bring rigorous science to the wide range of complementary and alternative health practices being used by the American public. We also want to make sure the public gets good information about this and to make sure that we’ve got a good research workforce who can do the kind of rigorous science that’s needed. Those are the three parts of our mission. My predecessor laid that out and I think it’s a good statement of the mission.
Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is defined quite broadly and incorporates a somewhat odd mixture of methods. It includes everything from single agent therapies like St. John’s wort for depression or ginger for nausea to wide-ranging healing systems like Chinese medicine, chiropractic and naturopathy. This must lead to challenging questions about where to allocate the substantial funds available through NCCAM. How do you determine where the money should be spent?
First of all, we operate within classic NIH systems. That means that we are highly dependent on expert review panels for the evaluation of ideas submitted by investigators across the country. In the chiropractic colleges, we have had some very strong research communities developing and lots of good grant submissions. The grants that come in from across the country are reviewed by panels that include CAM practitioners and experts that have the right scientific skills to evaluate the proposals and they rank them.
It’s very tough to get a grant from us—we only fund about 12 percent of the grants that are submitted. And the bulk of the priority setting is done by these expert review panels. The NIH peer review process has what’s called first- and second-level review. The first level is these expert peer review panels. The second level is review by our own scientific staff and then our advisory council. Our staff read very carefully, listen to the opinions of the expert peer review panels and then bring summaries and discussion of things that are on the border to our advisory council. The advisory council then advises me and I’m responsible for signing off on the recommendations. |
