By Brian Vastag

Seven years after the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) first launched its Roadmap for Medical Research, a broad-sweeping initiative designed to bridge the so-called ‘valley of death’ of drug development, the agency is on the verge of creating a new center devoted specifically to the goal of accelerating the transition of therapies from the lab to the clinic.

On 7 December, the NIH’s Scientific Management Review Board (SMRB) voted 12 to 1 in favor of forming a center for translational medicine and therapeutics. At the meeting, NIH director Francis Collins called the decision “a momentous occasion” but stopped short of immediately endorsing the center. (In NIH parlance, a ‘center’ is one step down the structural hierarchy from an ‘institute’.) Agency watchers, however, widely expect Collins to move ahead with the idea.

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