Bethesda, Maryland — Today, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) celebrates the second anniversary of progress guided by the NIH Roadmap for Medical Research. Launched in September 2003, the NIH Roadmap is a series of strategic initiatives fueling the movement of research discoveries from the bench to the bedside.

“The NIH Roadmap remains a key investment for accelerating medical research to benefit the public,” said Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt. “I am pleased with the progress made through the NIH Roadmap and look forward to major advances in the coming years.”

“From improving our basic understanding of biological processes to translating discoveries from the bench to the bedside, the NIH Roadmap is advancing science on all fronts,” said NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni, M.D. “We have built a strong foundation for the range of initiatives that will change the way we move science forward.”

In fiscal year 2005, NIH funded $235 million in new and continuing Roadmap projects. Key NIH Roadmap accomplishments include:

	Created New Pathways to Discovery with the establishment of advanced centers in nanomedicine, starting with four centers that will share approximately $42 million over five years. This emerging field could offer new ways of curing disease or repairing damaged tissues on a molecular scale. In addition, the Molecular Libraries Screening Center Network began work in June 2005 at a cost of $88.9 million over three years.
	Developed Research Teams of the Future with awards of more than $36 million through fiscal year 2006 to fund 21 Exploratory Centers for Interdisciplinary Research throughout the country. These centers allow grantee institutions to build teams of researchers from the life, physical, material, and computational sciences.
	Launched Re-engineering the Clinical Research Enterprise with its multidisciplinary clinical research training programs and Patient-Reported Outcomes Management Information System (PROMIS) initiatives. The PROMIS network of seven collaborating centers will develop a publicly available, adaptable, and sustainable system for assessing self-reported symptoms across a wide range of health conditions that affect a large proportion of the American public.

“We have established a base for transformational change in the 21st century,” said Zerhouni.

For more information about the NIH Roadmap, see 2005 NIH Roadmap Backgrounders [81 KB] and visit http://nihroadmap.nih.gov.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) — The Nation's Medical Research Agency — includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services. It is the primary Federal agency for conducting and supporting basic, clinical, and translational medical research, and it investigates the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit http://www.nih.gov.