For a while now, the National Institutes of Health has been emphasizing translational research  — taking scientific discoveries and helping to turn them into actual drugs or treatments. In December, the NIH proposed the creation of the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), which, as NIH director Francis Collins told the WSJ’s Amy Dockser Marcus then, is not intended to “turn NIH into a pharmaceutical company or compete with the private sector.” Rather, Dockser Marcus wrote that it’s envisioned as “a hub and driver for NIH efforts to push promising discoveries further down the drug discovery pipeline.” She continued: The hope is that NIH would eventually license the most promising compounds to pharma and biotech companies, which would then take the drugs the rest of the way through the FDA approval process and to market. But the former head of Merck, Roy Vagelos, worries that drug development is not the best ocean into which the NIH could be dipping its toe. At a panel at the annual meeting

of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), Vagelos said that translational and applied research aren’t the proper functions of the NIH and the scientists it funds. Instead, he said, universities are “good at producing new knowledge and discoveries,” aka basic research. Shifting resources away from NIH’s key function of supporting that research shrinks the funding possibilities for PhDs who want to move along the academic job pipeline. Letting them languish would reduce the discoveries that form the basis for applied research. “That is the pathway to destruction, as far as I can see,” he said. The New York Times has pointed out a collection of archived comments from researchers and staffers about the NCATS proposal, many of them critical of a shift in resources to more applied research. Readers, what role should the NIH be playing in taking discoveries from the lab to the patient’s bedside? Image: iStockphoto

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Former Merck Head Vagelos Says NIH Should Stick to Basic Research