The University of Pittsburgh – the first research-intensive public university in the United States with a chiropractic program, set to welcome its first class in fall 2025 – has received a $6.4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health. The grant will be used to establish a virtual resource center “designed to train, support and mentor complementary and integrative health (CIH) researchers from other institutions across the U.S.”
According to the University of Pittsburgh press release announcing the grant, the virtual resource center will be known as ENRICH: Encouraging Research in Complementary and Integrative Health Institutions; and will provide training to researchers nationwide on various skills including “grant development and administrative support, clinical research methods, interdisciplinary research collaboration, and mentorship and career development.”
“With this grant, Pitt will be seen as one of the national leaders in designing, training, and increasing the quantity and quality of evidence-based complementary and integrative medicine research,” said Michael Schneider, one of the principal investigators of the grant, director of the university’s Doctor of Chiropractic program – and one of a select few NIH-funded chiropractic researchers in the U.S. Dr. Schneider and Dr. Thomas Radomski, associate director of Pitt’s Institute for Clinical Research Education, will lead the ENRICH Center.
As the release emphasizes, one of the most important aspects of the grant from a chiropractic / CIH perspective is that the university is “an established top 10 recipient of NIH research funding … and has deep experience in producing evidence-based research, which is standard practice in health care and is used as the basis for health insurance companies’ decisions about coverage.” A stated goal of the ENRICH initiative is to “help CIH researchers develop clear evidence on the safety and effectiveness of CIH treatments.”
Another key component of the NIH grant, according to the release, is pilot studies, which can assist in providing preliminary data to apply for larger NIH grants. The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s Center for Integrative Medicine will award $500,000 in pilot awards – $100,000 every year for five years – to facilitate these studies.
The ENRICH center joins the RAND Corporation’s REACH (REsearch Across Complementary and Integrative Health (REACH) Institutions) center in Santa Monica, Calif., as the only two virtual resource centers currently funded by the NIH.
