The University of California has received a big boost in its efforts to turn discoveries into medical advances for patients: The National Institutes of Health has renewed grants for translational science at two campuses totaling $71 million.
The Clinical and Translational Research Institute (CTRI) at UC San Diego has received a five-year Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) for approximately $52 million from the NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translational Science.
Meanwhile, the Institute for Clinical & Translational Science at UC Irvine will receive an NIH CTSA award of $19 million over four years.
All five UC medical center campuses are part of the national CTSA consortium of 62 medical research institutions created to energize efforts to translate basic science discoveries into new treatments for patients. UC San Diego’s institute was established in 2010 with a $37.2 million CTSA award. UC Irvine’s institute also was established in 2010 with a $20 million CTSA award. UC Davis and UC San Francisco received CTSA renewal grants in 2011, while UCLA received its initial CTSA award in 2011.
UC San Diego: Accelerating the process
The new award recognizes UC San Diego CTRI’s success during its initial funding under the CTSA program.
“The first five years transformed our research environment and the way discoveries move from the lab to the clinic,” said Gary S. Firestein, M.D., director of CTRI and dean and associate vice chancellor of translational medicine at UC San Diego. “The next five will be about accelerating that process, expanding training programs and improving information systems tools for research.”
Firestein said greater emphasis and resources will be directed toward developing clinical trials that exploit the power of big data. “Rather than rely upon the traditional method of studying large numbers of patients, we’re moving toward massive data collection on individual patients. The goal is to integrate diverse approaches and disciplines to find new drugs and therapies and advance individualized treatments.”
The new award supports the expansion of the CTRI-mentored career development program to support young faculty members and funded research experiences for medical and pharmacy students; development of a phase one unit at the Center for Clinical Research; expansion of biomarker and biocomputational capacity; new infrastructure to speed the regulatory processes for reviewing research involving human subjects; and new informatics solutions to help researchers recruit for clinical trials. The CTRI, which had previously supported three junior faculty through the CTSA grant program, will now support eight and create a new post-doctoral fellowship focused on team science and managing complex projects.
UC Irvine: Forging a new direction
At UC Irvine, the award will help the ICTS create or continue to support a wide array of projects, including:
- Bringing to commercialization state-of-the-art devices no larger than a pinhead that help physicians determine the health of tissues while patients undergo surgery;
- Innovative pilot studies to develop new ways of diagnosing and treating cerebral palsy early in life;
- Novel approaches to mining the “big data” of all 13 million University of California health records to identify trends in disease and the success of new therapies with unprecedented power;
- Improving the understanding of how physical exercise lessens the impact of Alzheimer’s disease;
- Identifying new classes of drugs that kill cancer cells by starving them;
- Creating new teams of researchers, clinicians, patients and families across the UC system to tackle autism and uncommon illnesses such as Kawasaki’s disease;
- Building bridges with the community of health advocacy groups, practicing physicians and governmental agencies to ensure that UC Irvine health care discoveries are implemented rapidly throughout the area;
- Training and mentoring the next generation of clinical scientists and instilling the principles of team science in improving health.
“With this award, UCI continues to forge a new direction for clinical research in the U.S. for a generation to come,” said Dr. Dan Cooper, ICTS director and professor and chair of pediatrics at UC Irvine. “This renewal grant will accelerate our endeavors to build effective, multidisciplinary research teams to tackle important health issues, and it will further bolster efforts to involve our community in the excitement of clinical discovery as partners.”
