The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has undertaken a major agency wide initiative, called the Roadmap, to identify major opportunities and gaps in health research that no single institute at NIH could tackle alone but that the agency as a whole wishes to address to make the biggest impact on the progress of health research.

The Roadmap was startedby Elias A. Zerhouni, M.D. and director of NIH, who convened a series of meetings to chart a “roadmap” for medical research in the 21st century. The opportunities for discoveries have never been greater, but the complexity of biology remains a daunting challenge. NIH is uniquely positioned to catalyze changes that must be made to transform our new scientific knowledge into tangible benefits for people.

Developed with input from meetings with more than 300 nationally recognized leaders in academia, industry, government, and the public, the NIH Roadmap provides a framework of the priorities the NIH as a whole must address in order to optimize its entire research portfolio. It lays out a vision for a more efficient and productive system of medical research. It identifies the most compelling opportunities in three main areas: new pathways to discovery, research teams of the future, and re-engineering the clinical research enterprise.

Initiatives under the NIH Roadmap will help enable the agency to sustain its historic record of cutting-edge contributions that are central to extending the quality of healthy life for people in this country and around the world.

A detailed description of the Roadmap can be found at http://nihroadmap.nih.gov.

New initiatives appear daily, so should check the website often.