Moving research from ‘bench to bedside’ is all the rage these days. And it’s getting a lot of money too. Harvard Medical School, BU and Tufts are 3 of 14 institutions that the NIH recently announced would receive grants to start up Clinical and Translational Science Centers (CTSCs). Harvard will receive

$23.5 million a year for five years. One of the goals of Harvard’s center is to bring together researchers from HMS and its plethora of affiliated hospitals, who historically haven’t worked much together.

Just in time for this announcement, Nature ran a series of articles taking a look at translational research. This story in particular focuses on how the NIH is changing its approach to bringing science to the clinic through these CTSCs. The most interesting point to me in this piece was near the end…some critics question whether an NIH approach is the best way to do translational research. They say that nonprofits funded by patient groups/philanthropists are the more efficient way to get real results, rather than the old academic model that doesn’t always reward collaboration.