FRANCIS COLLINS FRONTRUNNER FOR NIH – Bloomberg reports that Francis S. Collins, the scientist who led the drive to map the human genetic code, is in the final stages to become the new head of the National Institute of Health (NIH):

Collins would take over an agency that President Obama has made key to his plans for reviving the U.S. economy and overhauling healthcare. The 27 institutes and centers under the NIH umbrella employ more than 18,000 people and fund research at thousands of universities and medical schools.

The former head of the National Human Genome Research Institute, a member agency, Collins became a driving force in the race to catalog the 3 billion letters of the human genetic code. As director of the institutes, Collins will face calls to boost spending on cancer research and free science from politics as well as financial conflicts of interest.

“NIH is a huge enterprise, and I think Francis has very good experience with getting the best out of a huge enterprise from what he did in the genome project,” said David Baltimore, a biology professor at Caltech who won the 1975 Nobel Prize in medicine, in a telephone interview in February. “He’s also very well liked in Congress.”

FDA: TOO FAST OR TOO SLOW – FDA Commissioner Margaret “Peggy” Hamburg and Principle Deputy Commissioner Joshua Sharfstein respond to public perception of being either “too fast or too slow” with drug approvals:

“To be healthy, people need access to a safe and nutritious food supply and to innovative, safe, and effective medical products. The FDA’s job is to support this access and, in doing so, to promote health, prevent illness, and prolong life. The ultimate measures of the FDA’s success should reflect its fundamental goals and go beyond such intermediate measures as the number of facilities inspected or drugs approved.”

Hamburg and Sharfstein go on to say the agency “should always ask whether delays in approval or safety problems can be prevented.” They note FDA tends to be viewed as either “too fast or too” slow with approvals. Too fast, and risk safety problems later; too slow, and risk sick people not getting therapies they need.

NIH TO DEVELOP MEDICINES FOR RARE AND NEGLECTED DISEASES – The NIH announced it will spend $24 million a year to work on moving a small number of drug candidates for rare diseases through the “preclinical” stage of development. WSJ’s Sarah Rubenstein writes:

It’s tough to get drug companies to work hard on drugs for diseases that are either rare altogether or common only in parts of the world where people can’t afford to pay much for treatment. So the National Institutes of Health is stepping in to try to develop drugs for these diseases itself.

NIH will spend $24 million a year to work on moving a small number of drug candidates through the “preclinical” stage of development and then look for a company willing to start the testing in humans. The failure rate is lower at that point, NIH notes. (However, there are still many failures.)