National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NIH)

The National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) is one of 27 institutes and centers that make up the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It is the most recently created NIH center, having been established on December 23, 2011, when President Obama signed the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2012. The overarching reason for NCATS is to improve human health through the application of smarter science. This entails the careful evaluation and streamlining of the extremely complex translational process involved in taking the amazing discoveries that have been accelerated in the basic sciences since the Human Genome [Page 941]Project’s completion in 2003, and developing new treatments based on molecular advances and associated technological innovations.

There is a lot of room for improvement in a process that takes ...