When: October 14, 2004
Where: NIH Campus, Lipsett Amphitheater, Clinical Center Building 10, Bethesda, MD
Institute: Office of the Director (OD)

On the one-year anniversary of the NIH Roadmap for Medical Research, NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni, M.D., and other NIH senior staff held a webcast for the general public that included a question-and-answer session. The NIH Roadmap is a series of far-reaching initiatives designed to transform the nation's medical research capabilities and speed the movement of scientific discoveries from the bench to the bedside. It provides a framework of the priorities the NIH must address in order to optimize its entire research portfolio and lays out a vision for a more efficient and productive system of medical research.

Over the past year, NIH has made significant progress toward accelerating the pace of discovery. The scientific community's response to NIH Roadmap solicitations has been robust, yielding many more new grant applications than expected, and drawing new researchers into the field. Newly funded projects aim to greatly increase the efficiency of the medical research enterprise. Among these new projects are innovative programs to train clinical researchers and to fund highly creative thinkers, a nationwide interconnected network of bio-computing centers, and projects supporting the development of a diverse array of small molecules and imaging probes freely available to all researchers.

Next Steps
More information about the NIH Roadmap and the one-year anniversary webcast are available at http://nihroadmap.nih.gov. To view the webcast, click on "Public Meetings and Workshops." Information about the NIH can be found at www.nih.gov.