Biography

Christine M. Colvis, Ph.D., 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.

Colvis serves as a leader for multiple NIH-wide initiatives. She is the co-chair for the Helping to End Addiction Long-term® Initiative, or NIH HEAL Initiative®, and the NIH-wide Preclinical and Translational Research in Pain Management team. She also served as the NIH co-chair of the Accelerating COVID-19 Therapeutic Interventions and Vaccines (ACTIV) preclinical working group from April 2020 through August 2021. In October 2021, Colvis was awarded the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health 2021 Charles A. Sanders, M.D., Partnership Award for her essential role in the ACTIV initiative.

Prior to joining NCATS, Colvis was a program director at the National Institute on Drug Abuse. She completed postdoctoral research at the National Eye Institute after receiving her doctorate in biochemistry and molecular biology from Oregon Health & Science University.

Research Topics

Colvis leads programs ranging from very early preclinical discovery and exploration of new treatment modalities with the potential to expand the target landscape to the development of therapeutics through early-stage clinical trials.

NIH HEAL Initiative and Helping to End Addiction Long-term are registered service marks of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.