NIH Director Releases "Roadmap" for the Future

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced a new $2.1 billion, five-year "NIH Roadmap" intended to broaden participation in medical research and help researchers, physicians, and drug companies turn scientific findings into new therapies.

The far-reaching plan features 28 initiatives organized around three main areas: new pathways to scientific discovery, research teams of the future, and re-engineering the national clinical research enterprise.

The Roadmap was developed over the course of the last year with the help of more than 300 consultants from the health industry, academia, government, and the public.

Two days after announcing the plan, NIH Director Elias Zerhouni, M.D., testified before a joint hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee that he will need more control over NIH spending and the NIH institutes to make the Roadmap a reality.

Presently, NIH is a loose confederation of 27 semi-autonomous institutes. The NIH director can only ask - not compel - institute directors to cooperate on an NIH-wide initiate, such as the Roadmap strategy. On top of that, the director controls only about 1 percent of the NIH's $27 billion budget.

The NIH Roadmap is available online at http://nihroadmap.nih.gov/. For Dr. Zerhouni's testimony October 2 before the Congress, go to Prepared Witness Testimony: Zerhouni, Elias.