Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), picked up the telephone and called reporters today, anxious to go public with his enthusiasm for an incipient translational medicine centre at NIH – and with his defense of the attendant dismantling of the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR).
Collins last spoke with Nature in early December, when his Scientific Management Review Board approved plans for the new National Center for Advancing Translational Science (NCATS), which aims to put NIH-funded researchers in the forefront of pushing therapies from lab to clinic. But since then, he has been prevented from promoting the project by a legal requirement that Congress be notified of his intention to create a new centre before public discussion can take place. That formal notice, in a letter from Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, arrived at Congress on January 14, freeing up the NIH director to hold forth.
In a telephone interview with Nature this afternoon, Collins said that plans for the proposed centre are moving forward “at lightning speed,” and that he expects a line-item for NCATS to be present in the 2012 budget that the Obama administration will send to Capitol Hill next month. That would allow the new centre to be up and running when the government’s fiscal year begins on October 1st.
The NCATS’ birth marks “a truly goundbreaking moment to move academic investigators funded by NIH into the opportunity to develop therapeutics,” Collins says. “It’s an opportunity that maybe could not have happened five years ago— and if we waited five years, it would have been too late. This is the moment.”
But seizing the moment has a price: An existing law caps the number of NIH institutes and centres at the current 27, which means the NCRR must be dimantled to pave the way for NCATS. The resources centre became an obvious target when it was decided that its half-billion-dollar programme of Clinical and Translational Science Awards, comprising nearly 40% of its budget, would be moved to the new translational science centre. In quick succession, the remaining pieces of NCRR became candidates for relocation.
The agency posted proposed details of its plans for NCRR’s dismantling earlier this week in this straw model. (It’s part of a very public feedback website that the agency launched in December.) Agency deputy director Larry Tabak has also spent this week hosting a series of conference calls with NCRR constituents concerned about the future of the programmes that support them.
Today, Collins defended the demolition of NCRR, a centre beloved by many scientists as the unglamorous but essential funder of their biggest toys and tools and the home of important training grants, for instance, to train veterinarians in lab animal medicine and veterinary pathology.
“We are not proposing to zero out any [NCRR] programmes,” Collins said. “The programmes are valuable and the people who run them are valuable. But we believe they could be even more effective if distributed in different places.”
In the straw model, agency officials are proposing, for instance, to move shared and high-end instrumentation grants and non-primate disease model resources to the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. Specialized imaging grants would go to the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering. But many of NCRR’s residual programmes will be put in an “interim infrastructure unit,” which looks a great deal like a substantially slimmed-down NCRR. Collins said today that that unit is strictly a holding place for programmes that don’t have an immediate, obvious home in another NIH institute, until the best decision can be made as to where to relocate them. “We are going to make decisions that ultimately will strengthen those programmes and not do damage to them,” he said.
More than 1,100 comments on the restructuring have poured in on a feedback blog that NIH established last month. According to Collins, comments on the NCATS have been “almost universally enthusiastic.”
Stakeholders of NCRR have not been nearly so happy. “I recognize that translational medicine is a wave of the future,” wrote comparative pathologist Brad Bolon, “but the decision to ride the wave by gutting the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR) will, if done in typical fashion, engender a host of unintended consequences which may kill the NCATS before it can really start.”