NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – The National Institutes of Health said today it plans to spend nearly $230 million in a partnership with 10 pharmaceutical firms and several non-profit groups to jumpstart efforts to find targets for new drugs and diagnostics.

NIH created the Accelerating Medicines Partnership (AMP) as a new model for spurring development of drugs toward US Food and Drug Administration approval, a process which has a failure rate of 95 percent and which can take a decade and cost more than $1 billion