109th Congress

American Center for Cures Act of 2005

S. 2104

Background

In 2003, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) reported to Congress on ways that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as an organization could be revitalized to meet 21st-century health challenges. The report examined the question of an optimal organizational structure for NIH and made a number of recommendations. NIH has responded to NAS’s recommendations with several major initiatives, including:

• The NIH Roadmap for Medical Research: This identifies major opportunities and gaps in biomedical research that no single Institute at NIH could respond to alone but that the Agency as a whole must address in order to make the biggest impact on the progress of medical research. The Director of NIH sought input from more than 300 nationally recognized leaders in academia, industry, and government and from the public to develop the NIH Roadmap, a framework to optimize the NIH research portfolio. The NIH Roadmap lays out a vision for a more efficient and productive system of medical research, identifying the most compelling opportunities in three main areas: New Pathways to Discovery, Research Teams of the Future, and Re-engineering the Clinical Research Enterprise.
• Clinical and Translational Science Awards: These awards assist institutions in creating a new, integrative academic home with consolidated resources for clinical research in order to 1) captivate, advance, and nurture a cadre of well-trained multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary investigators and research teams, 2) create an incubator for innovative research tools and information technologies, and 3) promote synergy among multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary clinical and translational research and researchers to bring about the application of new knowledge and techniques to clinical practice at the front lines of patient care.
• Office of Policy Analysis and Strategic Initiatives: This office will identify scientific investment opportunities based on proposals from individual scientists, stakeholders, and organizations outside NIH. Projects that are approved by a Council of Councils (representatives from all Institute and Center [IC] advisory boards) will be funded for an initial 5-year term, with annual review. After 5 years, progress on the initiative will be evaluated; if necessary, the project will be granted 5 more years of funding. No initiative will be funded for more than 10 years.

In 2003, during his presidential campaign, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman (D-CT) expressed a desire to encourage more rapid development of novel drugs and tools to effectively treat diseases of critical importance to the Nation’s health. As a Democratic presidential candidate, he proposed that the Federal Government allocate $150 billion in public and private funds over 10 years to create an American Center for Cures (ACC) responsible for accelerating the search for cures for Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, diabetes, heart disease, and other chronic conditions. In Senator Lieberman’s original vision, the ACC would commission private companies to conduct research and develop drugs in an attempt to bring treatments to market more rapidly. The cost of the program would be shared by the Federal Government and private companies, which would be required to return a portion of the royalties on drugs developed with the assistance of the Center. Senator Lieberman said that the ACC would “complement, not replace” research being done by Federal agencies such as NIH and the National Science Foundation.

S. 2104, the American Center for Cures Act of 2005, incorporated themes from Senator Lieberman’s presidential campaign and sought to implement major recommendations of the 2003 NAS report on revitalizing NIH.

Provisions of the Legislation/Impact on NIH

Major provisions of S. 2104 would have created a new $5-billion ACC to promote the rapid translation of public and private research into therapies, diagnostics, and tools that can effectively treat and possibly cure diseases of critical importance to domestic and global health. The bill would have also created health-focused federally funded research and development centers that would have brought together interdisciplinary teams of experts, including scientists, clinicians, epidemiologists, and pharmacists, for a limited time period to focus on developing therapeutic breakthroughs for important disease entities. Other provisions included standardizing NIH information-management systems and the reporting requirements for publicly funded research in order to improve information-sharing among the applied science, translational research, and business communities and creating a special Health Advanced Research Projects Agency to support innovative, multidisciplinary, collaborative research among NIH ICs, between NIH and other Federal agencies, and among NIH grantees and business partners.

Status and Outlook

S. 2104 was introduced by Senators Lieberman and Thad Cochran (R-MS) on December 14, 2005, and was referred to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. No further action occurred on this legislation during the 109th Congress.