Washington

The director of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has announced a long-term plan for the biomedical research agency in which its component institutes will join forces to tackle priority projects.

The NIH Roadmap, released by director Elias Zerhouni on 30 September, was developed by NIH institute directors and outside experts. Zerhouni says the NIH will begin implementing the plan in 2004, at an initial cost of $125 million, rising rapidly to $2 billion by 2009.

The plan includes 28 programmes in three main categories: new technologies, new types of research team and ways to improve clinical research infrastructure. NIH institutes will contribute from their individual budgets to support the programmes. “For the first time, there's been a real change in the way institutes fund common projects, because every institute has agreed to contribute to this common fund,” Zerhouni says.

The plan will move the NIH along the road to supporting 'big' biology. For instance, the structural-biology programme calls for scientists to find new ways to produce large amounts of membrane-bound proteins and study them in a systematic way. Currently, there is no good way to isolate and study such proteins.

Another programme will set up libraries and databases of small molecules to be studied as potential drug treatments, and a third will create centres to write software for the analysis of biological data.

Another aim will be to build teams of investigators from diverse backgrounds: a series of programmes and conferences will foster collaborations between biologists and physical scientists. The roadmap also contains plans for the training of clinical researchers and for centres of excellence in translational research — the interface between lab work and patient care.

Zerhouni says the Roadmap is an attempt to address scientific problems that the NIH has struggled with in the past, such as multidisciplinary projects that require many institutes to work together. He acknowledged scientists' fears that biology research has shifted away from investigations by individuals, towards large, technology-driven science.

“Our sense from talking to the community is that we need to create new modes of exploration because the scale and complexity of scientific problems has increased,” Zerhouni says. “That's what we're doing and we'll find out what the results are soon.”

David Korn of the Association of American Medical Colleges says: “Universities, scientists and journals are all going to have to adjust to the multidisciplinary mode of science, and this plan moves in the right direction. But it's going to be a very unsettling change.”