Launched in 2014, the NIH Common Fund’s Illuminating the Druggable Genome (IDG) Program enables researchers to explore understudied proteins with the potential to be modified by medicines. In November, a request for grant applications moved IDG into its implementation phase. The program plans to allocate $54 million to advance research through the development, broad dissemination, and use of community scientific resources to study human proteins for which publicly available information or active research is lacking. IDG aims to catalyze the discovery of novel biology, with a particular focus on understudied members of the protein kinase, ion channel, and non-olfactory G-protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) families. The program is administered by NIDDK, the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences and the National Cancer Institute: https://commonfund.nih.gov/idg/index