NCATS: five, alive and kicking

Born amid a flood of controversy from academics and companies alike, NIH's National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) has endured to celebrate its fifth birthday last month. Director Chris Austin sat down with BioCentury to discuss the institute’s successes, challenges and strategic plan for the next five years and beyond.

NCATS was launched on Dec. 23, 2011 to speed up the process of turning basic research findings into medical interventions by consolidating all of NIH's translational activities under one roof, and by identifying and solving industry-wide bottlenecks in preclinical and clinical science...