UAB Synopsis, Vol. 27, No. 26, July 7, 2008
UAB’s leadership rejoiced May 30 as it announced NIH approval of a Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) totaling $26.9 million over 5 years. The grant restructures UAB’s research enterprise to facilitate translational science in several ways and provides UAB entrée to a variety of future NIH funding opportunities that are crucial to the university’s health and growth.
The grant funds a university-wide Center for Clinical and Translational Science (CCTS) with its director, Lisa M. Guay-Woodford, MD, as principal investigator.
UAB’s application for the CTSA gained traction with NIH after it broadened to a transuniversity effort, enhanced its bioinformatics base, and emphasized strengths in outcomes and health disparities research, says Dr. Guay-Woodford. She is professor and vice chair of the Department of Genetics.
“The CTSA brings huge payoffs to UAB,” she says. “This new paradigm emphasizes interdisciplinary science at its core. It draws on our rich history of preclinical studies, the General Clinical Research Center, and our community outreach — whether outcomes research or health disparities — to make available the resources required for effective clinical and translational research.”
A corollary payoff for UAB is a tighter working relationship between the academic medical center and the UAB Health System. In addition, the new structure — much of which was started even as the application was being written — promises to streamline regulatory complexities, extend partnerships with Alabama’s historically black colleges and universities to broaden outreach, train future researchers in clinical and translational science, and punch UAB’s entry card to a variety of road-mapped functions the NIH will be offering.
With the funding UAB becomes a member of a consortium 37 other centers that will grow to 60 in the near future. The consortium’s Web site CTSAweb.org ensures broad access to CTSA resources, enhances communication, and encourages information sharing.
The award from NIH’s National Center for Research Resources is part of the federal effort to energize the discipline of clinical and translational science, transform how research is conducted, and ultimately enable researchers to provide new treatments more efficiently and quickly to patients.
“We will have an accelerated ramp-up to full implementation with the goal of completing the initial framework by late December,” Dr. Guay-Woodford says. “We want to spend the lion’s share of this funded period on bringing our endpoints to fruition rather than on planning.”
She said UAB developed a pan-university CTSA application with the blessing and assistance of Senior Vice President for Medicine and School of Medicine Dean Robert R. Rich, MD.
“It was clear we had some good ideas, but they needed to be broadened to include all the health schools and joint health science departments as well as the undergraduate schools and the Graduate School,” she says. “We had strong support from the UAB president and provost and from every one of the 13 campus deans, who signed letters detailing how they would contribute to the effort. Our application was embraced as a whole university effort.”
UAB’s CTSA bears the UAB hallmark of broad, overarching themes of outcomes and health disparities research, she says. “We plan to develop new themes as time and science and community interest dictate. The next theme will be genetic health and medicine, which reflects not only the completion of the Human Genome Project, the movement towards molecular medicine, and the increasing interest to deliver personalized medicine, but also is enhanced by establishment of the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology in Huntsville.” (See accompanying story.)
UAB also has attracted other partners for its effort, including Southern Research Institute, Children’s Health System, and a variety of community organizations in the state.
In fact, community interaction is a key feature of the new CCTS. “We have worked with community organizations for years on health and health disparities,” Dr. Guay-Woodford says. “We now will expand those efforts so the general community can access us and advise researchers. At the same time, scientists will have ways to help people in the community understand the complexities of the research continuum and provide realistic timeframes for new advances.”
CCTS Leadership
CCTS Director:
Lisa M. Guay-Woodford, MD
CCTS CoDirectors:
Eta S. Berner, EdD
W. Timothy Garvey, MD
Catarina I. Kiefe, MD, PhD
Jay M. McDonald, MD
Cross Cutting Themes:
Donna K. Arnett, PhD
Mona N. Fouad, MD, MPH
Evaluation Director:
J. Jackson Barnette, PhD