After being deluged with complaints about their plan to dissolve one research center to make room for another, leaders at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) heard a welcome sound today: voices of support.

At the same time, the plan’s prime mover, agency director Francis Collins, made it clear that – opposition notwithstanding – the proposed National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) remains on a fast track to being established in October. In a conference call with reporters this afternoon, Collins said that the agency will advertise “in the very near future” for a director for the new center. “We want to cast a wide net, nationally and internationally,” he added.

Before speaking with reporters, Collins participated in a 90-minute telephone meeting of the agency’s Scientific Management Review Board (SMRB), which advises him on structural changes to the agency, and which voted in December to approve the establishment of NCATS. At today’s meeting, patient groups and scientists offered opinions that ranged from cautious praise to urgent admonitions that NIH quickly establish the NCATS, and not prolong the study of the accompanying dissolution of the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR).

“NCATS offers an unparalleled opportunity to advance translational medicine and improve human health,” said James O’Leary, the chief innovation officer at the group Genetic Alliance in Washington.

“We are concerned at the reaction that this new center is receiving from some sectors,” added Amy Comstock Rick, the chief executive officer of the Parkinson’s Action Network, a Washington-based patient advocacy group. “While arguments are being made to challenge the [new center’s establishment] no one is addressing the impact that inaction is having on the very desperate need to promote clinical and translational science.”

Yesterday, Jeremy Berg, the director of NIH’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), submitted this public comment to the SMRB, “strongly” urging the board to recommend that the NCRR not be abolished until an “appropriately transparent process” studying the wisdom of that move takes place.

In addtion, the NIH feedback website has received more than 1,100 comments about the proposal, many of them negative, and many concerning the abolition of the $1.3 billion NCRR, whose largest program, the Clincal and Translational Science Awards, would be moved to the new center. Its remaining programs would be transferred to other NIH institutes and centers, as well as to a new infrastructure entity in the office of the NIH director.

But today, positive sounds even came from NCRR constitutents who had previously voiced concerns about the relocation of their programs. One that has been a target of concern for senators as well as scientists, the Institutional Development Awards (IDeA) program, was initially slated by agency leaders for an “interim infrastructure unit.” But in an updated plan released yesterday, it is housed in the NIGMS.

Judith Van Houten, a biologist at the University of Vermont, said during the telephone meeting that the National Association of IDeA Principal Investigators “is very pleased that we are now assigned to a standing institute.”

Stuart Zola , a neuroscientist at Emory University in Atlanta, who directs the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, also sounded pleased with the movement of the National Primate Centers Program out of the “interim infrasturcture unit” and into the office of the the NIH director. That “really is the right placement,” Zola said. Because of the breadth of areas that primate work touches on, from basic research to clinical applications, he added, it is best that the program not be housed in a disease-specific institute. He also applauded the chance that the program’s new home may present for it to be more involved in outreach and training. “We are glad to be part of this new dynamic.”

The revised plan for relocating NCRR’s remnants, and the proceedings at today’s SMRB meeting, clearly did not pacify all critics. “Even (or especially) after today’s teleconference, the rationale for dismantling NCRR at this time is not clear,” wrote a commentator identified as Angela Steele on NIH’s feedback website.

“The SMRB has not engaged in a really serious critical assessment of NCRR, but instead has been cowed by the pre-determined plans of the Director…..I’m trusting that if the SMRB doesn’t engage with a serious NCRR analysis, that Congress will,” Steele concluded.

Precisely what Congress will do with NIH’s plan will become clear in the coming weeks and months, after NIH develops and delivers to Capitol Hill a budget plan for the new center. That budget amendment is intended to reach Congressional appropriators in time for them to fund the institute beginning in October.

For Collins, that timing is the right timing. Quoting his predecessor, Elias Zerhouni, in the conference call today, he argued, “It’s never the wrong time to do the right thing.”

In the meantime, dissenters will continue to have a forum to make their case, at the NIH feedback blog, at a March 14 “town hall” meeting for stakeholders, and on Capitol Hill.