The NIH Roadmap is a set of bold initiatives aimed at accelerating medical research. These initiatives will address challenges that no single NIH institute could tackle alone, but the agency as a whole must undertake. The Roadmap identifies the most compelling opportunities in three arenas: new pathways to discovery, research teams of the future, and reengineering the clinical research enterprise.

The Molecular Libraries and Imaging initiative will offer public sector biomedical researchers access to small organic molecules, which can be used as chemical probes to study cellular pathways in greater depth. It will provide new ways to explore the functions of major components of the cell in health and disease. The initiative will also accelerate the availability of promising new drugs, especially for rare diseases. The development of such libraries will also enhance the discovery of small molecules for molecular imaging - the imaging of molecules or molecular events in biologic systems that span the scale from single cells to whole organisms.

In these molecular libraries and imaging initiatives, NIH will support development of high-specificity/high-sensitivity probes with the goal of improving detection sensitivity 10- to 100-fold within five years. An existing NIH database of imaging probes relevant to cancer and brain function will be expanded to establish a single database that describes specificities, activities and applications of imaging probes for a wide range of diseases and biological functions. In addition, NIH will construct an Imaging Probe Development Center to provide a mechanism for producing significant quantities of probes for which there is no good commercial supplier, as well as to generate novel imaging probes for biomedical research and clinical applications.