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On Wednesday, I visited the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) research facility in Rockville, MD to meet with Dr. Francis Collins, Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and representatives of the University of Kansas to tour the facility and learn more about important research collaborations involving KU. NIH is the focal point for our nation’s medical research and NCATS is a center within NIH focused on accelerating the development of new medical treatments and therapies. To achieve this mission, NCATS requires researchers in a wide variety of scientific disciplines to work together toward a common goal.

KU is uniquely involved with this NCATS collaboration through the university’s Institute for Advancing Medical Innovation. Last year, NIH announced that it was partnering with KU Medical Center and the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society to accelerate the development of therapies for rare blood cancers. This partnership, which is one of the first of its kind at NIH, will test whether a generic arthritis drug called auranofin could be useful in treating a form of leukemia. The goal of this initiative is to overcome bottlenecks in the drug discovery pipeline to get discoveries from the lab to the patient bedside faster.

Thanks to Director Collins and his team for the opportunity to learn more about NIH’s strategy for innovating the process for translating scientific discoveries into new treatments. Also, thanks to the following KU representatives for joining me at this meeting: Dr. Scott Weir, Director of the Institute for Advancing Medical Innovation at KU; Dr. Roy Jensen, Director of the KU Cancer Center; Dr. Raymond Perez, Medical Director of the Clinical Research Center at the KU Cancer Center; and Jack Cline, Director of Federal Relations at KU. Click here to see photos from this event.