Infographics

View, download and share infographics developed by NCATS about translational science and some of the Center’s programs and focus areas.

About Translational Science

Seven characteristics of a translational scientist include: boundary crosser, team player, process innovator, domain expert, rigorous researcher, skilled communicator and systems thinker

Seven Characteristics of a Translational Scientist

More treatments, more quickly. That’s the goal of translational science. 95 percent of diseases have no treatments: There are thousands of diseases but only hundreds of treatments. New treatments take far too long to develop, require an average of 10–15 years and fail 95 percent of the time. Translational science is improving the process by understanding what’s similar across diseases to help develop multiple treatments at a time, developing models that better predict a person’s reaction to a treatment, and enhancing the design and conduct of clinical trials so the results more accurately reflect the patient population. Learn more at ncats.nih.gov.

Translational Sciences: More Treatments, More Quickly

The circular translational science spectrum represents each stage of research along the path from the biological basis of health and disease to interventions that improve the health of individuals and the public. The spectrum is not linear or unidirectional; each stage builds upon and informs the others. At all stages of the spectrum, NCATS develops new approaches, demonstrates their usefulness and disseminates the findings. Patient involvement is at the center and is the critical feature of all stages in translation.

Translational Science Spectrum

About NCATS Programs and Focus Areas

The circular ASPIRE infographic shows the key factors of speeding scientific solutions for the opioid public health crises. There are four component areas: novel chemistries and innovative technologies that will revolutionize discovery, development and pre-clinical testing of the other two component areas of better treatments and drugs for opioid use disorder. At the center are three states: planning, prototype development and milestone delivery; and prototype delivery, independent valuation and testing.

A Specialized Platform for Innovative Research Exploration (ASPIRE)

A researcher types into the computer screen “predict treatments for disease y.” The query is sent to the Translator’s Autonomous Relay Agents (ARAs) to determine how best to answer the query. The ARA will then break the query into smaller tasks that are transmitted to rich, specialty knowledge bases called Knowledge Providers (KPs). This process will be iterative, such that the ARAs and KPs can build on information from the others. The last sequence is the results of the query showing up on the computer screen of the researcher.

Biomedical Data Translator

Rural scene that highlight 6 areas depicted by graphic icons. Mountain represents the Appalachian Translational Research Network); the barn represents the Penn State Clinical and Translational Science Institute; a tractor represents the Rural Health Research Support Network; a physician’s office represents the Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana and Idaho region Practice and Research Network; a group of people represent the Peer-based Retention of People who use Drugs in Rural Research; and the pharmacy represents the Collaboration to Enhance Naloxone Distribution in Rural Areas.

CTSA Program Rural Health Efforts

Picture of person called “chip” with 13 clickable icons representing tissues and organ systems they represent, 2 icons are not clickable. The clickable icons are: brain; lungs, heart, muscle, liver, kidneys, gastrointestinal system, female reproductive system, blood vessels, fat, joints, skin and disease models. The two unclickable icons represent the ear and male reproductive system.

Tissue Chip for Drug Screening

The NCATS Pharmaceutical Collection (NPC) is a storehouse of approved drugs. Scientists use the collection to identify potential ways to repurpose drugs for new uses. Over the past 10 years, researchers used the NPC to study an array of pathways and disease models, generating an unparalleled amount of data. A number of projects produced drugs with new potential uses that have entered clinical trials, or have shown activity in testing, for several diseases and viruses. The NPC contains nearly 3,000 small molecule drugs. More than 300 requests for collaborations to screen the NPC resulted in 200 plus collaborative projects in such areas as rare and neglected diseases, infectious diseases and cancer. Illustration of a human body surrounded by names of several diseases that point to a specific location in the body.

NCATS National Pharmaceutical Collection

A graphic image that has stylized depictions of facts and statistics about rare diseases and includes information such as: GARD provides high-quality, widely used resources to educate, engage and empower the rare diseases community; GARD offers disease information pages for more than 6,500 rare diseases; GARD staff have answered more than 90k questions; RDCRN is funded to accelerate medical research across rare diseases; the RDCRN teams study approximately 200 diseases; RDCRN includes 140 patient advocacy groups and partners; 1 out of every 10 people in the U.S. are affected by a rare disease; 1 in 2 patients diagnosed with a rare disease are children; it takes 3 or more years to receive an accurate diagnosis of a rare disease; there are less than 500 approved treatments across 7k rare diseases.

Rare Diseases: Individually Rare, Collectively Common

Copyright and Reuse of Graphics

The NCATS website uses a mix of copyrighted and copyright-free graphics (including illustrations and photos). If you want to reuse a graphic, please follow these guidelines:

  • Copyrighted graphics will usually be credited to individuals or organizations. Permission to reuse these must be negotiated directly with the creators, and not NCATS.
  • Graphics explicitly credited to NCATS are copyright-free and may be used without our permission. Please credit the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences as the source.

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