The purpose of the new the NIH Therapeutics for Rare and Neglected Disease program (TRND) is to develop new candidate drugs for individuals with rare and neglected diseases. TRND activities will build upon the NIH Roadmap to accomplish its goals including the successes of NHGRI's NIH Chemical Genomics Center (NCGC). NCGC facilitates drug discovery from the basic research lab to the pre-clinical stage. Picking up where NCGC's work leaves off, TRND will concentrate its efforts on the pre-clinical stage of drug development, where researchers develop so-called ?clinical candidate? drugs in preparation for human testing. In doing so, TRND will help bridge the wide gaps in time and resources that often exist between basic research and clinical testing of new drugs. It is expected that in most cases, TRND's clinical candidates will be licensed to biopharmaceutical companies for further development, thus allowing TRND to focus on the scientifically challenging pre-clinical stages of the drug development, and ?de-risking? the projects sufficiently to make them adoptable by private sector companies. The NIH Office of Rare Diseases Research (ORDR) will handle oversight and governance of TRND. Researchers will perform TRND's laboratory work in a new facility administered by the intramural research program of NHGRI.
