Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) was born in late 2011, and immediately kicked off a fierce debate among academics and industry experts about the US National Institutes of Health (NIH)'s role in fostering drug discovery. While the firestorm has started to settle, the NIH's newest centre still has its work cut out and its critics to win over. Under the leadership of Chris Austin, who was appointed as its director in September, it has now started to focus its goals. Austin, a neurologist who worked at Merck on genome-based drug discovery, joined the NIH in 2002 and worked as Director of the Therapeutics for Rare and Neglected Diseases (TRND) programme and the NIH Chemical Genomics Center (NCGC) before stepping into his new role. He plans to tackle the “tragedy of the commons” drug discovery problems, he told Asher Mullard.
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Chris Austin. Nat Rev Drug Discov 12, 182–183 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrd3960
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nrd3960
