Washington, D.C., September 30, 2003 - Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) President Jordan J. Cohen, M.D., issued the following statement on the "NIH Roadmap for Medical Research," released today by National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Elias Zerhouni, M.D.:

"The 'NIH Roadmap' is a daring effort by Director Zerhouni to mobilize the leadership of the NIH and the biomedical research community to identify major needs, opportunities and roadblocks in translating the remarkable fruits of basic biomedical research into public benefit. The planning process focused on initiatives that would best be accomplished by a trans-NIH effort. They fall into three major clusters that deal with next-generation research instrumentation and tools, the creation of an interdisciplinary workforce, and the establishment of a clinical research enterprise. Many of the specific proposals in the clinical research cluster were first developed and articulated in the Clinical Research Summit project jointly led by the AAMC, the American Medical Association, and Wake Forest University School of Medicine.

The Roadmap vision is imaginative and bold, and its implementation will challenge not only the ingenuity of the NIH but of its major research partners, the university and academic medical communities. These communities will face major organizational, functional, and cultural changes in accommodating the transition of biomedical research from what has traditionally been a principal investigator focused "cottage industry" to an era of "big science" led by interdisciplinary teams that span the biological, chemical, physical, and engineering sciences. Perhaps the most exciting component of the plan are those proposals promoting the development of new research tools, ranging from libraries of chemical structures, small bioactive molecules, and imaging probes, all of which is to be made "freely accessible" to the research community, to powerful new imaging technologies, including nanotechnology.

AAMC applauds this effort and looks forward to the exciting opportunities and challenges it will present as the academic medicine community works with NIH to implement the Roadmap in the coming months."

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The Association of American Medical Colleges is a not-for-profit association representing all 129 accredited U.S. and 17 accredited Canadian medical schools; nearly 400 major teaching hospitals and health systems, including 68 Department of Veterans Affairs medical centers; and 94 academic and scientific societies. Through these institutions and organizations, the AAMC represents 109,000 faculty members, 67,000 medical students, and 104,000 resident physicians. Additional information about the AAMC and U.S. medical schools and teaching hospitals is available at www.aamc.org/newsroom.

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