Four lessons from the pandemic to reboot the NIH

The COVID-19 pandemic represented an important test for the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), the largest funder of biomedical research in the world. Many say that it passed admirably: the agency substantially contributed to the high-speed development of medicines and vaccines to fight SARS-CoV-2 by funding basic research and collaborating with pharmaceutical firms to coordinate clinical trials at a breakneck pace.