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NIH to bolster RECOVER Long COVID research
efforts through infusion of $515 million
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https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/who-we-are/nih-director/statements/nih-bolster-recover-long-covid-research-efforts-through-infusion-515-million
Four years after the COVID-19 pandemic began, Long COVID remains an unsolved, complex and urgent healthcare crisis. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1 in 9 adults in the United States who have ever had COVID-19 continue to experience Long COVID with a wide range of symptoms. Many symptoms are debilitating, affecting patients’ ability to work and go to school. To bolster Long COVID research efforts, NIH is investing an additional $515 million over the next four years into the Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery (RECOVER) Initiative(link is external), a nationwide research program to fully understand, diagnose and treat Long COVID. Launched in 2021 with $1.15 billion in Congressional appropriations, the RECOVER Initiative is taking a systematic, comprehensive and rigorous approach to improve our understanding of Long COVID and increase the odds of identifying treatments that work.
Nearly 90,000 adults and children are participating in RECOVER observational studies through more than 300 clinical research sites across the country. RECOVER sites have directly recruited more than 30,000 new people, including children and pregnant people, and simultaneously incorporated data from ongoing longitudinal studies to nearly triple RECOVER’s number of participants. The amount of data being produced is unparalleled compared to any program in the world. Deidentified data and biospecimens from RECOVER are accessible and used by researchers and scientists to unravel this complex disease.
NIH expects this investment of time and resources in building a research program of this scale, scope and rigor will increase the odds in finding treatments that work. The $515 million in additional funding will build on and continue this important work by:
• Testing additional interventions in clinical trials to find effective treatments to reduce the burden of Long COVID.
• Deepening our understanding of how SARS-CoV-2 affects each part of the body as it triggers Long COVID and identifying potential biological targets for diagnosis and treatment.
• Investigating longer-term effects of SARS-CoV-2 infection in adults and children to understand who fully recovers over the long term, how the virus affects risk for other diseases such as diabetes, cancer and neurological disorders, and factors and interventions that contribute to recovery.
• Maintaining support for data management and research infrastructure to continue the collection, integration, analysis and storage of many diverse types of clinical data and biospecimens necessary to further understand the effects of COVID-19 and inform interventions.
NIH is committed to working with our partners to provide solutions for those with Long COVID.
Monica M. Bertagnolli, M.D.
Director
National Institutes of Health
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