Easing Doubts

The US National Institutes of Health caused many researchers to become concerned when it announced in 2010 that the Clinical and Translational Science Awards program would be under the auspices of the then-proposed, now-realized National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, says ScienceInsider's Jocelyn Kaiser. The worry for researchers was that NCATS officials would have no interest in supporting CTSAs for aspects of medicine that don't involve therapeutics, she adds. However, doubts may be easing slightly, after NIH issued a request for applications for CTSAs due to be renewed. The program, which has a 2012 budget of $461 million, is set to renew activities including community research and epidemiology, Kaiser says.