Advocacy

NIH Translational Science Center Officially Established

Endocrine Insider
January 12, 2012

(see full issue)

In the fiscal year (FY) 2012 spending bill, Congress specified appropriations for the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), thereby providing official approval for the Center to be established.  The formation of NCATS comes after several months of uncertainty regarding the status of funding for the proposed Center. The $576.5 million allocation to NCATS was included in the $30.64 billion FY 2012 appropriation to NIH—a $240 million (approximately 0.8 percent) increase over the FY 2011 NIH budget.

NIH Director Francis Collins, MD, PhD has touted NCATS as having the potential to revolutionize translational science and overcome the challenges of developing new drug treatments. The Center will be the new home of the Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSAs), which were formerly a large part of the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR).  With the departure of this major program, NCRR will be dismantled and its other programs will be distributed among existing NIH Institutes and Centers. The CTSAs will remain a significant program under NCATS, with a congressionally mandated budget floor of $487.8 million (to be drawn from all funding available throughout NIH). More information regarding the redistribution of NCRR programs can be found at: http://www.ncrr.nih.gov/. 

 
In addition to the CTSAs, NCATS will incorporate the following programs according to a December 23 NIH press release:

  • Bridging Interventional Development Gaps, which makes available critical resources needed for the development of new therapeutic agents
  • Cures Acceleration Network, which enables NCATS to fund research in new and innovative ways
  • FDA-NIH Regulatory Science, which is an interagency partnership that aims to accelerate the development and use of better tools, standards and approaches for developing and evaluating diagnostic and therapeutic products
  • Office of Rare Diseases Research, which coordinates and supports rare diseases research
  • Components of the Molecular Libraries, which is an initiative that provides researchers with access to the large-scale screening capacity necessary to identify compounds that can be used as chemical probes to validate new therapeutic targets
  • Therapeutics for Rare and Neglected Diseases, which is a program to encourage and speed the development of new drugs for rare and neglected diseases

While the search for an NCATS director is underway, the Center will be led by Acting Director Thomas Insel, the current director of the National Institute of Mental Health, and Acting Deputy Director Kathy Hudson, NIH's deputy director for science, outreach, and policy.