NIH Director Francis Collins and CF Foundation to Brief U.S. Senate on Advancing Disease Research

May 19, 2010

National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D., will lead a briefing on Capitol Hill Thursday, May 20, to discuss how funding for medical research at the NIH can be used more quickly to create new therapies for patients and save lives.

Since being appointed director of the NIH, Collins has stressed the importance of bridging the gap between basic research discoveries and the human testing of drugs. On average, it takes 15 years to translate scientific findings into viable therapies.

Collins created an NIH program—Therapeutics for Rare and Neglected Diseases (TRND)—and cites the drug development efforts of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation as a model.

 “The CF Foundation has shown the way, has lit up the path…and what’s been learned from CF can be extrapolated, generalized, to hundreds of other diseases,” he said.

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