Earlier this year, Francis Collins confirmed plans to rearrange some furniture at the US National Institutes for Health (NIH), reshuffling the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR) and creating the new National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), due to open this October. But as the months passed, it seemed less and less likely that the agency could meet that ambitious timeline. Where were the resources for this reform? The leadership? The political backing?

Some answers started to trickle in last week when US Health and Human Services secretary Katherine Sebellius wrote a letter to her bosses in the Senate, complete with a proposed budget for the new center. Under the plan, the NCATS would have a total budget of around $720 million, with some $550 million coming from the old NCRR funding pool, $50 million from the Therapeutics for Rare and Neglected Diseases Program (formerly administered by the National Human Genome Research Institute) and $18 million from the Office of Rare Disease Research (formerly within the NIH director’s office).

Additionally, the NCATS is slated to receive $100 million from the Cures Acceleration Network (CAN), a half-million drug development grant program included in last year’s health reform legislation. Organizers had previously hinted that CAN would be folded into the new center; this letter made that official.

“This is the first news that I’m aware of that there’s new, unassigned money in the NCATS,” Garret FitzGerald, associate dean for translation research at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in Philadelphia, told Nature Medicine. This would give future leadership more freedom to develop the center beyond a simple rearrangement of other programs and “help foster other aspects of translation therapeutics,” FitzGerald says.

With the bulk of the NCRR’s former budget, the new center is also expected to takeover the Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSAs), a program launched in 2006 to build academic hubs devoted to translational research (see ‘Four years on, clinical partnerships program proves worth’). Today, the NIH reached its goal of funding 60 CTSA institutions with the announcement that five more centers had been formed in Pennsylvania, California, Kansas, Minnesota and Kentucky. But questions remain about how the NIH’s organizational reshuffle will affect how the program operates. “Will NCATS in some way refocus the mission of the CTSAs? Will that have consequences for the program?” asks FitzGerald. “That’s a bit of an unknown at the moment.”

Another unknown: who will lead the new center. “It will be a somewhat challenging leadership position, although replete with opportunity,” says FitzGerald. The NIH has not yet publicly started accepting applications, but Nature Medicine would love your nominations. Who do you want to see head up the new center? Please leave your thoughts in comment section below.