Christine Colvis is the director of NCATS’ Office of Drug Development Partnership Programs (ODDPP). ODDPP promotes innovations that improve the efficiency of the discovery and development of or improve the quality or accessibility of treatments for patients.
Colvis joined NCATS in 2012 to lead the NIH–Industry Partnerships initiative, which supported preclinical and clinical research using investigational drugs provided by pharmaceutical company partners for disease indications not being pursued by the companies. Since then, ODDPP has expanded and now also manages the Illuminating the Druggable Genome Program, an NIH Common Fund program that aims to expand the target landscape by providing foundational knowledge about understudied druggable proteins. Additionally, ODDPP leads the Biomedical Data Translator program, which integrates data and knowledge from vastly different biomedical domains to enable discovery of associations not previously reported. Finally, always looking for win-win solutions to problems, Colvis is leading the development of a new publication format — LitCoin — that will generate machine-readable scientific literature and support more complete sharing of scientific observations, knowledge and data through bona fide literature-based credit. LitCoin launched in the fall of 2021 with a Natural Language Processing Challenge.
