The purpose of the new, Congressional mandated, NIH Therapeutics for Rare and Neglected Diseases (TRND) Program is to build on the chemical genomics efforts of the NIH Roadmap to develop new drugs for patients with rare and neglected diseases. The opportunity is commensurate with the need, since the Human Genome Project has revealed the genetic underpinnings of thousands of rate and neglected diseases. TRND will focus not only on developing drugs for such diseases, but also on scientific paradigm and technology development to improve success rates in the preclinical stage of drug development generally. Specifically, TRND's disease-specific goal will be to generate clinical candidate compounds and data packages on them that are sufficient for Investigational New Drug (IND) Applications to the FDA.
