Writing in Science, NIH Director
Presents New Research Strategy

NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni this week published in Science his "roadmap" for the agency's future in terms of medical research—a plan for speeding the time it takes for research discoveries to travel from the laboratory to the offices of the nation's health care providers.

"As I assumed the directorship of the NIH, early discussions…convinced me that the NIH needed to examine its portfolio with an eye to identifying critical scientific gaps," Zerhouni wrote in a Science perspective, "The NIH Roadmap." "…as science becomes more complex, it is converging on a set of unifying principles that link apparent disparate diseases through common biological pathways and therapeutic approaches. NIH research needs to reflect this new reality."

The roadmap lays out a strategy for using the recent doubling of the NIH budget to focus on three main areas of research—new pathways to discovery, research teams of the future and re-engineering the clinical research enterprise.

More information is available in "The NIH Roadmap" or on the Science website.

—Coimbra Sirica

1 October 2003