Never before has there been such a sense of urgency to rethink the way in which therapeutics are discovered and developed. Drug development has grown less efficient with every passing year (http://www.phrma.org; Scannell et al, 2012), at the same time as fundamental understanding of human biology in health and disease has exploded. For example, the number of diseases with an identified molecular basis is fast approaching 5000, but the vast majority of these have no Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved therapy (http://www.omim.org/statistics/geneMap). Neuroscience has been particularly affected by these trends, such that, although advances in our understanding of neural development, plasticity, and circuitry were being celebrated at the end of the Decade of the Brain in 2010, many large and small pharmaceutical companies were abandoning neuroscience because of the high rate of failure in neuropsychiatric drug development. In part to address these problems in therapeutic development, the NIH commissioned its Science Management Review Board (SMRB) to study the problems in translation and recommend changes to the NIH structure to address them. In response to the SMRB's report (http://smrb.od.nih.gov/documents/reports/TMAT_122010.pdf), NIH proposed the creation of a new Center at NIH that would address the scientific and operational roadblocks to translational efficiency. On 23 December 2011, the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) was created through the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2012, (P.L. 112-74), which amended the Public Health Service (PHS) Act to include the NCATS. The mission of the Center is to create and test innovative methods, strategies, and technologies that enhance the development, testing, and implementation of interventions that improve human health. The NCATS is focused on what is common among diseases and the translational process, to identify and disseminate general principles that will accelerate translation of fundamental discoveries into tangible improvements in human health.