Clinical research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) was due to receive a major boost this week with the official opening of a 242-bed, $540-million centre at the agency's main campus in Bethesda, Maryland.

A ribbon-cutting ceremony on 22 September launched what is said to be the largest centre of its kind in the world. It is named the Mark O. Hatfield Clinical Research Center, after an Oregon senator who strongly supported the NIH.

The centre will form the mainstay of the NIH's intramural clinical research programme at a time when the institute's director, Elias Zerhouni, is striving to improve links between laboratory and clinical research. “There will be a lot of people watching — and hopefully we won't disappoint,” says the centre's director, immunologist John Gallin.

Laboratories and patient wards sit side by side in the new building and most are equipped for either function, allowing space to be transferred seamlessly from one purpose to the other.

The centre also boasts special facilities, such as a 12-bed unit devoted to clinical studies of obesity. To take account of its residents' unusual size, the unit includes an enlarged magnetic resonance imaging scanner, widened doorways, reinforced toilets and vending machines that log the calorific value of patients' selections. One of the issues researchers plan to study is whether obese people's physiology and brain activity change after stomach-reducing surgery.

But, like other clinical research programmes in the United States, the centre faces a challenge in attracting staff with appropriate experience, as most physicians are encouraged to pursue lucrative work on patients rather than research. The centre is developing a variety of measures to entice researchers, including a computer system to cut the paperwork surrounding clinical trials.

The centre will also focus effort on areas that are sometimes ignored by other medical institutions, such as research into rare diseases, says the president of Boston's Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Ed Benz, who chaired a panel earlier this year on the future of NIH intramural clinical research.