The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced a major strategy last week for enabling government funded medical research to meet modern challenges by making greater use of molecular biology and developing research teams that cross traditional boundaries.
Announcing what has become known as the NIH Roadmap, the director of the NIH, Elias Zirhouni, said: “As the 21st century unfolds, discovery in the life sciences is accelerating at an unprecedented rate. As science grows more complex, it is also converging on a set of unifying principles that link apparently disparate diseases through common biological pathways and therapeutic approaches. NIH research needs to reflect this new reality.”
The roadmap has been developed through discussions between the NIH, the scientific community, and the public over the past year. Participants were asked to look at three key issues: what are today's most pressing scientific challenges, what are the road blocks to progress, and what must be done to overcome these.
Working groups then translated the three main themes that emerged from these discussions—new pathways to discovery, research teams of the future, and re-engineering the clinical research enterprise—into 28 practical initiatives, resulting in the roadmap.
Initiatives in the section on new pathways to discovery—designed to improve understanding of complex biological systems—aim to help researchers gain better access to information and techniques in genetics and molecular biology. They include measures to improve molecular imaging and the development of small molecular libraries.
The NIH will award grants for research in structural biology, development of metabolomics technology, and proteomics. In addition, it will support the development of new screening centres for bioactive small molecules, a publicly accessible chemi-informatics reference database (to be housed at NIH's National Center for Biotechnology Information), and a database and core facility dedicated to synthesising and distributing molecular imaging probes.
The agency will also begin planning a series of nano-medicine centres—carrying out quantitative measurement and manipulation of biological processes at the nanoscale or molecular level—which will be launched in 2005.
Measures designed to develop research teams of the future aim both to bring researchers from different disciplines together to solve complex biomedical research problems and to explore new organisational models for teams of scientists to work together.
Dr Zirhouni suggested that solving the puzzle of complex diseases would require understanding of the interplay of a range of factors. “We will need the expertise of non-traditional teams of biological scientists, engineers, mathematicians, physical scientists, computer scientists, and others.”
Information on the NIH roadmap can be found at http://nihroadmap.nih.gov