Wall Street Journal - October 1, 2003
Antonio Regalado, Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

To speed the discovery of new medicines, the NIH said, the U.S. must create technologies for probing cells, get physicists to work alongside biologists and make better use of the thousands of citizen volunteers who each year help test a cornucopia of experimental medicines.

By harnessing the accelerating pace of discoveries being made in laboratories, the road map will "truly transform the way we do research" said Elias Zerhouni, director of the NIH, the government agency that provides the bulk of the country's funding for biomedical research.

Universities and patient groups applauded the plan, saying it addressed important areas not likely to be tackled by individual NIH institutes, which are organized around particular diseases.

The programs cover three broad areas: new technologies for studying networks of molecules in cells, improved training and cooperation among research teams, and improved processes for studying drugs in clinical trials.

The road-map programs, which will receive $130 million next year and about $500 million annually by 2009, are expected to widely enhance the effectiveness of research across the NIH, which in recent years has seen its budget more than double to $28 billion.

The NIH's budget now accounts for 80% of all federal spending on biomedical research, and observers said the agency is under growing pressure to deliver noticeable results. "Like it or not, with all the money pumped into the NIH, the public is eager to see some practical benefit," said David Korn, a senior vice president at the Association of American Medical Colleges.

Approximately half the road-map funds will be spent to improve testing of potential new medicines. Stephen Katz, an NIH institute director involved in the planning, said the agency is trying to create a flexible, nationwide system for testing drugs and answering other pressing public-health questions. Currently, doctors use antiquated methods, incompatible computer systems and are sometimes poorly trained. Dr. Katz said the NIH would also try to increase public participation in drug and other studies.

Although many of the initiatives haven't yet been fleshed out, the road map has "an enormous amount of support in the community," said Ellen Sigal, chairman of Friends of Cancer Research, a patient-advocacy group. "There is a lot of research on AIDS and diabetes and cancer, but some needs transcend any particular disease."

The road map also gives a major boost to researchers interested in systems biology, or the study of complex networks of molecules inside cells.

Tuesday, the NIH, which is based in Bethesda, Md., announced that the first $42 million in road-map funds would go to centers involved in advanced studies of proteins, computing and to create interdisciplinary research teams.

Write to Antonio Regalado at antonio.regalado@wsj.com

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