Former congressman Harold Ford, the Chair of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) along with Al From the DLC's executive director wrote an article proposing An American Center for Cures. At first glance it looks like a big government takeover of drug development. In fact, it is a reintroduction of bi-partisan legislation conceived by Senators Joe Lieberman and Thad Cochran in 2005 that takes the NIH Road Map program one step further: it creates nearly 100 portfolios and and federal funding for "small, flexible, entrepreneurial, and non-hierarchical, and empower portfolio managers with substantial autonomy to foster research opportunities with freedom from bureaucratic impediments in administering the manager's portfolios." The goal is not so much to find cures but to train basic scientists in the art and science of clinical trials, drug development, translational research. They are laboratories or farm systems design to fill a gap identified by the Critical Path: the inability to apply insights of discovery to drug development and the regulatory science.
Ford and From describe the Center this way:
Ford and From describe the Center this way:
"The American Center for Cures would be a public/private partnership that would function as an independent entity within the National Institutes of Health, targeting research resources from government, academia and the private sector on cure-driven projects. It would pay for high-risk, high-reward research, fund small businesses that have created possible cures but lack the money necessary to test drugs in clinical trials, and work to streamline the clinical trial process."
There is a danger is politicizing science of course, (what else is new?) but if the ACC can roust the NIH out of its current torpor and shift resources towards more partnerships and clinical trial reform, it is worth a discussion.
thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/F
