NCATS, DARPA and FDA Collaborate to Develop Cutting-edge Technologies to Predict Drug Safety
President Obama announced that the NIH will collaborate with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the FDA to develop a chip to screen for safe and effective drugs far more swiftly and efficiently than current methods, and before they are tested in humans. This groundbreaking effort is an example of the types of innovative projects that would be led by the proposed National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS).
NCATS would help identify barriers to progress and provide science-based solutions to reduce costs and the time required to develop new drugs and diagnostics. "What we need are entirely novel approaches to translational science, to take full advantage of the deluge of new biomedical discoveries that have been made in recent years," said Frances Collins, MD, PhD, Director of the NIH.
As proposed, NCATS will study the steps in the process of diagnostics and therapeutics development, identify the bottlenecks, and experiment with innovative methods to streamline the process. By focusing on developing innovative new tools and methods for therapeutics development, as opposed to developing therapeutics themselves, NCATS will enable others to bring safer and more effective medical products to market in less time. In this way, NCATS will complement, and not compete with, the work of the private sector and other NIH translational science efforts.