The US National Institutes of Health recently received funds to create the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences. The center's acting director, Thomas Insel, who is also in charge of the National Institute of Mental Health, sat down with ScienceInsider's Jocelyn Kaiser to talk about some of NIH's plans for NCATS, and how the new center will work with industry to improve R&D.
Insel tells her that NCATS will have an intramural program, but that the center will also try to break down the wall that separates intramural and extramural research. "So we're looking at NCATS as a place to raise questions about the relationship of intramural to extramural and how we can get them to cross talk and provide a much more dynamic kind of relationship than what we've had up until now," Insel says.