The dissolution of the freestanding drug and alcohol research institutes at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) – and the birth of a new addictions research institute in their place –– moved a significant step closer to reality today (18 November).

In a statement issued this afternoon, Francis Collins, the NIH director, declared that a proposal to create a new institute devoted to studying substance use, abuse and addiction “makes scientific sense.” Responding to a plan officially proposed to him on 15 November in a report by the agency’s Scientific Management Review Board, Collins said he was asking a task force of senior NIH officials to begin studying how a restructuring can be effected. He said he expected the task force to produce “a detailed reorganization plan for my consideration” sometime in the summer of 2011. The group will be convened and led by Collins’ prinicpal deputy director, Lawrence Tabak, and by Stephen Katz, the director of the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases.

The task force, Collins said, will “look carefully across all of NIH’s 27 Institutes and Centers to determine where substance use, abuse, and addiction research programs currently exist and make recommendations about what programs should be moved into the proposed new Institute.” The group will also be asked to survey the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) for programmes that are not related to substance use, abuse, and addiction research — and to recommend where among the agency’s 25 other institutes and centers those programmes will be placed.

The proposal has encountered strong opposition among scientists funded by the $462 million alcohol research institute, who argue that an addictions institute will obscure alcohol research, costing the field young scientists. They also say that it will imperil NIAAA’s systems approach to alcohol toxicity, by moving studies of end-organ damage like liver cirrhosis and discrete, related conditions like fetal alcohol syndrome, to other NIH institutes not devoted to alcohol or addiction.

Constituents of the $1 billion drug abuse research institute, by contrast, have generally supported the idea of an addicitons institute. They argue that the pathophysiology of drug and alcohol addictions overlap hugely, and that drug addicts are also, frequently, alcohol abusers.

While Collins promised that the final recommendations of the task force will “be informed by consultation with the relevant stakeholders,” today’s announcement seems to indicate that it is now not a matter of if — but when and how — a new addictions institute at NIH will be established.