The National Institutes of Health (NIH) will adopt a radically new strategy for pursuing basic and clinical research, NIH Director Elias Zerhouni and a panel of NIH institute directors announced yesterday (September 30) at a press briefing in Washington, D.C. Zerhouni told the audience that medical research was at a "critical point in its history" and that despite the many recent advances in science and medicine, the field of biology has also grown exceedingly complex.
The so-called "NIH Roadmap," which is primarily geared toward extramural academic centers, represents a major revamping of the way NIH funds research, Zerhouni said. The new approach aims to take on, as a group of institutes, projects that no one institute could tackle on its own for lack of resources, expertise, or infrastructure.
"These initiatives are integrated to accelerate our knowledge, to translate that knowledge into effective prevention and treatment strategies, and in many ways ...
