NIDDK NEWS

Seven Initiatives Seek to Bridge Basic, Clinical Research

The National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, or NIDDK, is pushing to improve the ability of researchers to turn breakthroughs in basic science into new patient treatments and tests, focusing its attention on several initiatives designed to promote this translational research.

The effort to boost translational research follows a high-profile 2003 call to action by participants in the Institute of Medicine’s Clinical Research Roundtable. Those researchers, writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association, said they were worried that scientific breakthroughs “are failing to be translated efficiently into tangible human benefit.”

Part of NIH ‘Roadmap’
The National Institutes of Health, or NIH, has made promotion of such research a centerpiece of its “Roadmap for Medical Research in the 21st Century,” and NIDDK will concentrate its resources in seven areas, including better imaging technologies, better animal models, and a more vigorous search for drugs to treat diseases caused by misformed proteins.

“Concrete initiatives are coming out of this,” said Allen Spiegel, M.D., director of NIDDK, who said the effort is designed to help fill “valleys of support” in the research spectrum.

Spiegel acknowledged that the move toward more robust translational research at the NIH would require partnerships with industry, such as pharmaceutical companies, which often foots the bill for later-stage research. “If we are to be successful in translational research, we will have to be extremely thoughtful in how we deal with industry.”

The Seven Translational Areas

• Biomarkers: NIDDK is encouraging researchers to examine new ways to assess disease progression and treatment effects through the use of new tests using blood, tissue, and other samples.
• Imaging of Solid Abdominal Organs and the Urinary Tract: Doctors are often frustrated by the lack of reliable noninvasive ways of monitoring digestive, kidney, and urinary health, prompting an effort to find better imaging technology and techniques that will allow physicians a more precise understanding of these diseases.
• Animal Models: NIDDK is pushing researchers to work on finding new or improved animal models in an effort to improve the safety and efficacy testing of new therapies that must be done before a treatment is offered to humans.
• Angiogenesis and Diabetes: Control of angiogenesis—the process by which the body creates new blood vessels—could lead to better understanding of several complications of diabetes, such as wound healing and nerve damage, and research into this process may improve the outcomes of islet transplant in patients with type 1 diabetes.
• Preventing Oxidative Stress: Hyperglycemia, or high blood glucose, often causes a buildup of damaging oxygen molecules in a part of the cell called the mitochondria. NIDDK is encouraging researchers to find new ways to halt that process, and thereby lessen complications from diabetes.
• New Therapies Targeting Proteins: Errors in the way proteins are made and used in the body are responsible for a range of diseases; this effort seeks to find molecules capable of stopping those defects.
• RNA Interference: NIH would like researchers to realize the promise of therapies that interfere with messenger RNA molecules responsible for disease processes, an early-stage research effort that has generated many unresolved issues.

NIH Publication No. 06–4531
October 2005