Last month, Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, broadcast his plans for a new $1 billion institute aimed at accelerating drug development.The new institute, to be called the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, will focus on early-stage drug research — including large-scale chemical screening and animal testing — in order to encourage pharmaceutical companies to invest in later, more expensive stages.As The New York Times pointed out, the need for new treatments ismost noticeable in mental health, a field in which the same handful of drugs that were prescribed 60 years ago are still being handed out. In the past couple of years, the pharmaceutical industry has taken a keen interest in autism, but most of its efforts to date have been in repurposing existing drugs, rather than creating new ones.Read more at...SFARI, February 2011.