"Translational science is a team sport (...). Working collectively is vital to establishing innovative approaches that can benefit the broad scientific and patient communities. 

NCATS leaders, staff and partners published three articles in the February 2014 Current Topics in Medicinal Chemistry, a themed issue focused on collaboration.

1. The first article, “Playing well with others! Initiating and sustaining successful collaborations between industry, academia and government,” is a free downloadable editorial by John C. McKew, Ph.D., acting director of the NCATS Division of Pre-Clinical Innovation (DPI), and Craig Thomas, Ph.D., head of DPI’s chemistry technology activities. The authors highlight several collaborations that led to success despite a challenging environment of diminishing resources.
2. In “Leveraging public private partnerships to innovate under challenging budget times,” authors Lili Portilla, M.P.A., director of NCATS’ Office of Strategic Alliances, and Mark Rohrbaugh, Ph.D., director of the NIH Office of Technology Transfer, describe how new NIH and industry alliances are helping to strengthen the drug development pipeline.
3. The third article, “Collaborative development of 2-hydroxypropyl-β-cyclodextrin for the treatment of Niemann-Pick type C1 disease,” describes one of the first projects taken on by NCATS’ Therapeutics for Rare and Neglected Diseases program. Authors from NCATS and other NIH institutes and centers, academia, and the private sector explain how they overcame scientific, clinical and financial challenges to develop a therapy using cyclodextrin as a potential treatment for Niemann-Pick type C1 disease, a fatal genetic disorder. NIH researchers now are evaluating cyclodextrin in a phase I clinical trial at the NIH Clinical Center.