Washington

On target: Elias Zerhouni (right) and institute heads. Credit: E. BRANSON/NIH

It is just over a year since Elias Zerhouni, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), announced a far-reaching plan to transform key areas of biomedical research in the United States. And last week, the NIH director declared that his “roadmap” for the agency is bang on schedule.

“The roadmap has really taken hold,” both inside and outside the NIH, Zerhouni said at a briefing held on 14 October to mark the anniversary. “We have made a lot of progress,” Zerhouni said. He added that the biomedical agency's institutes and centres have responded to his $2.2-billion, six-year blueprint with “enormous and amazing speed”.

Outside observers have endorsed Zerhouni's upbeat assessment of the roadmap's progress. Grandiose plans in government often “seem to take for ever”, notes David Moore, a lobbyist for the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC). “But they have gone in a relatively short time from the conceptual to actually having programmes in place.”

At the briefing, Zerhouni provided a list of 192 roadmap project awards that have been made in 2004. But some observers are unsure that the project will outlast Zerhouni's tenure. A radiologist, Zerhouni is keen to align the NIH more closely with patients' immediate needs for medicines and technologies. This is a significant turnabout for an agency whose agenda has traditionally been driven by basic research in molecular biology.

But Zerhouni said that extramural researchers have met “every single” roadmap initiative with a more enthusiastic response than the NIH had expected. Some 1,000 researchers applied for nine extramural Pioneer Awards, which provide $500,000 of funding each year for five years, with no strings attached.

The roadmap aims to get NIH institutes and centres to work towards three broad goals: better systems-biology tools; enhanced interdisciplinary team research; and accelerated clinical research to get discoveries from bench to bedside more quickly. The specifics include a network of biocomputing centres, new interdisciplinary research centres and innovative training for clinical researchers (see Nature 425, 438; 2003 and 425, 545; 2003).

The whole project is consuming less than 1% of the NIH's $27.8-billion budget, including $129 million in 2004. “But it is an important percentage,“ Zerhouni said last week, “because it's what we call ‘risk money’.”

Moore says that the plan is being supported in the Congress. The feeling among legislative staffers is that it “is giving a direction to the NIH”, he says. “It's not just more of the same.”

Anthony Means chairs the department of pharmacology and cancer biology at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, where researchers have won seven roadmap grants this year. Means says that, as president of the Endocrine Society, he backs the roadmap because of its emphasis on getting basic science discoveries to patients. For the first time in his 30 years in science, Means says, he's hearing an NIH director clearly say: “If you expect to be funded by the NIH, you're going to have to be willing to consider the application of the science that you're doing.”

That message has met with mixed reviews from investigators, Means adds: “Some people have taken to it pretty well. And others say they don't want to be told how to do science.”

Still others are sceptical that, in an era of essentially flat NIH funding, the roadmap can outlive Zerhouni's tenure. “There is some fear that it won't be a sustainable thing,” says Tony Mazzaschi, associate vice-president for research at the AAMC. Mazzaschi points out that the initiative's funding is predicated on voluntary yearly contributions from all 27 NIH institutes and centres. When funding gets tight, and the choice is between funding a roadmap initiative and an institute's own best research grant proposals from individual investigators, Mazzaschi says, “some of these cross-institute initiatives may be a lesser priority for a given institute. As they say, ‘all politics is local’.”