National Institute of General Medical Sciences

The National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), a sub-agency of the Department of Health and Human Services National Institutes of Health, funds and manages research grants supporting basic biomedical science and workforce development; it is not a significant federal contractor but operates as a major grant-making body within the federal research ecosystem.

NIGMS administers a small contract portfolio alongside a dominant grant-making mission. The Institute has awarded 410 federal contracts totaling $89.6 million in combined potential value since 2007, with $47.4 million obligated as of the most recent update. Contract activity has been sparse and inconsistent: 7 awards in 2022, 11 in 2023, 16 in 2024, 1 in 2025, and 13 year-to-date in 2026. The most recent contract award is recorded as 2026-09-29. The contract portfolio is highly fragmented across 96 distinct prime contractors. By award count, the top five primes (BLT Fund9 Bethesdan LLC, New TECH Solutions Inc., and Travel Concepts Inc., each with 4–5 awards) account for 38 percent of recent awards; by potential value, the top five (led by Mpower Incorporated at $39.8 million, followed by At-Impact LLC at $5.3 million) account for 57 percent of combined potential value. Ninety-seven percent of contract awards carry no set-aside designation; small-business set-asides (2 percent) and woman-owned small-business awards (less than 1 percent) represent the only reserved categories in the portfolio.

Grant-making dominates the Institute's activity. NIGMS has awarded 16,710 grants totaling $52.97 billion in federal dollars obligated since 1974, distributed across 1,352 distinct recipients. Grant awards per year over the last five years were 1,252 in 2023, 1,078 in 2024, 908 in 2025, and 1,122 in 2026; an additional 32 awards are recorded with a future date of 2027-03-01. The grant portfolio is highly fragmented: the top five recipients by award count (Regents of the University of Michigan with 98 awards, the Leland Stanford Junior University with 92 awards, and the University of Wisconsin System with 89 awards) account for only 8 percent of recent awards; by federal dollars, the top five (the University of Chicago at $218.7 million, the Regents of the University of Michigan at $181.8 million, and the Johns Hopkins University at $170 million) account for 2 percent of total federal dollars obligated. Ninety-nine percent of grants are Project Grants; Cooperative Agreements represent 1 percent of the portfolio.