Foundation for the National Institutes of Health

The Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH) is an American not-for-profit charity that raises private sector funds to support the mission of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The FNIH was founded by the U.S. Congress as a not-for-profit 501©(3) charitable organization in 1990.¹⁾ Its role is to “support the mission of National Institutes of Health (NIH) and to advance collaboration with the biomedical researchers from universities, industry and nonprofit organizations.”

Its role is similar to the Reagan-Udall Foundation for the Food and Drug Administration or the CDC Foundation, acting as a public-private partnership in ways that the National Institutes of Health is not ethically or legally empowered to pursue. “Through the years, the FNIH has built alliances and public–private partnerships that have transformed the research landscape and focused on areas in which there is special scientific need for input from the private sector.”

On April 17, 2020, the NIH announced the Accelerating COVID-19 Therapeutic Interventions and Vaccines (ACTIV) public-private partnership to develop a coordinated research strategy for prioritizing and speeding up development of COVID-19 vaccines and pharmaceutical products.²⁾ ACTIV is a collaboration with Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the US Department of Defense (DOD), the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), Countermeasures Acceleration Group (formerly Operation Warp Speed), and the European Medicines Agency (EMA).

The FNIH Pandemic Response Fund was created to assist Dr. Francis Collins and Dr. Anthony Fauci in their “efforts to rapidly end the threat from COVID-19.”³⁾

As listed on the 2019 and 2020 FNIH donor reports.^{4) 5)}