© 2003 by Oxford University Press
© 2003 Oxford University Press
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‘Roadmap’ Gives New Direction to Trans-NIH Research
The National Institutes of Health has announced a series of 28 new scientific initiatives that the NIH director Elias Zerhouni, M.D., said will "transform the way all of NIH research is done."
The so-called NIH Roadmap for Medical Research intends to take advantage of recent research advances and stimulate new collaborations among NIH’s 27 institutions and centers. The new approach will facilitate research projects that no single institute or center could tackle alone for lack of resources, expertise, or infrastructure, said Francis Collins, M.D., Ph.D., director of the National Human Genome Research Institute.
The initiatives were developed through meetings convened by the NIH during the past year to identify major opportunities and gaps in biomedical research that the agency still needed to address. The resulting initiatives are based on input from some 300 biomedical experts in academia, industry, government, and the public.
The initiatives are organized around three broad themes: new pathways to discovery, which includes the creation of molecular libraries and national centers for biomedical computing; research teams of the future, which includes initiatives to encourage interdisciplinary research; and reengineering the clinical research enterprise, which includes the integration of clinical research networks and the translation of basic discoveries to early-phase clinical testing.
The entire effort is projected to cost $2.1 billion over the next 5 years, and $130 million is scheduled to be spent in 2004. The money will be drawn from the budgets of the individual institutes and centers.
The new initiatives will help the National Cancer Institute achieve its goal of eliminating suffering and death due to cancer by 2015, said NCI director Andrew von Eschenbach, M.D.
Collins likens the Roadmap to where the Human Genome Project was when the search for genes first began: "This is a historic time for medical research," said Collins. "The potential is almost impossible to overstate."
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J Natl Cancer Inst 2003 95: 1740-1741.
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