Senate Bills - 109th Congress

S. 2104—The CURES Act

On December 14, Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) introduced S. 2104, the CURES Act, to establish, within the National Institutes of Health, an American Center for Cures. Although the text of the introduced bill is not yet available, a draft of the measure indicated this new $5 billion Center would focus on acceleration and development of public and private research efforts towards tools and therapies for human diseases with the goal of early disease detection, prevention, and cure. The center would fund new Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs) to bring together interdisciplinary teams of extramural scientists to focus on specific therapeutic and disease research. The bill would also create new high risk, high reward grant portfolio that would be the biomedical correlate to the Department of Defense’s DARPA program. Clinical research provisions are similar to the goals of the new NIH Clinical and Translational Science Awards. Other provisions would create a Rapid Access to Intervention Development (RAID) program similar to the NIH RAID program recently created under the NIH Roadmap for Medical Research, a toxicity program modeled after existing programs at the National Cancer Institute, and a program to create a new clinical study registry and results database. The bill would move existing NIH technology transfer and small business innovation research grant functions into the new American Center for Cures. S. 2104 was cosponsored by Senators Thad Cochran (R-MS); Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX); and Thomas Carper (D-DE) and was referred to the Senate on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.

Legislative Update (December 2006): American Center for Cures