Reading Room Production — page 347

ll be or coordinated with you in that regard as well. With respect to Heidi, she comes from the intelligence community so doesn't have a scientific or pharmaceutical background, but as you'll see she is a very quick study. She oversaw White House coordination of the response to the pandemic and has been acutely sensitized to the deficiencies of our countermeasures development efforts. I think she'll be most interested to hear about your and Dr. Collins's vision for CAN and how it will facilitate translational efforts at NIH. It's probably worth your reviewing the HHS Medical Countermeasures Enterprise Review document just to get your head in the game. For the better part of a decade, our efforts on MCMs have focused on traditional government approaches to financing technology development (R&D funds for academia, advanced development contracts for industry, and procurement contracts serving as the main "reward") with some twiddling of other pull incentives, with only marginal success against threats we can define and not much progress in developing true rapid response capabilities. The main conceptual novelty of MCMI is the focus on adjusting the cost side of the equation by making strategic investments at what we've been calling the "chokepoints" of product development - the places where projects are failing or dying on the vine for reasons other than lack of safety or efficacy. The overarching goal of MCMI is to change the nature of the public-private partnership governing product development efforts in this area, changing the role of government from one of "funder" to active strategic collaboration. This is where I think what we are doing will be of interest to you: we are using the national security imperative to maintain focus and drive budgets but adopting an approach which ought to be fungible to other areas where our translational efforts are faltering. Heidi's goal won't be to co-opt CAN but to think strategically with you about how what we are doing might serve to enhance our drug development efforts more broadly (and hopefully preserve the competitiveness of the US biopharmaceutical industry in the process). Happy to chat further but I think that's the kernel of what she'll be interested in discussing with you. Do you have a brief bio you could send over by any chance? Best regards, and I look forward to meeting you on Monday - Richard Best, Richard ------ Forwarded Message From: "Ranganathan, Rajesh (NIH/OD) [C]" @nih.gov Date: Wed, 17 Nov 2010 20:50:57 -0500 To: "Hatchett, Richard J." @nss.eop.gov Subject: Re: Discussion about Cures Acceleration Network and the President's Medical Countermeasures Initiative (MCMI) Richard: Can you give me some background on what Ms. Avery is likely to be interested in hearing about. Is there anything I should know about MCMI to be