As part of his 2012 TedMed talk, the US National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins says that the time between understanding the molecular cause of a disease and developing a drug to treat that disease is too long, and the process is too expensive. Collins further suggests that drugs that have been shown to be safe in humans — though not effective for their original target diseases — could be repurposed for other diseases, as the new National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences is aiming to do.