New National Institutes of Health (NIH) Grants Could Make Washington Hot Spot For Clinical Research
Washington Business Journal -- The Washington area could become one of the country’s go-to locales for clinical research, thanks to $58 million in National Institutes of Health grants now flowing to partnerships involving five D.C. hospitals and one of the region’s largest health care systems.
Work is under way to develop two centers to take advantage of the grants, awarded by the NIH’s National Center for Research Resources on July 14. The grants are designed to break down traditional barriers within academia and hospitals that often stymie efforts to turn laboratory advances into new patient treatments.
Recipients say the long-term implications could be dramatic, giving the region more clinical advances, more highly trained researchers and more opportunities for revenue-generating spinoffs.
“To just look at this award as a dollar amount over five years, and its impact on the economy and health of the D.C. region, would be very shortsighted,” said Dr. Joseph Verbalis, a Georgetown University professor of medicine and co-director of the new Georgetown-Howard Universities Center for Clinical and Translational Science. “What it really is, is a multiplier effect."
The two D.C. grants were among nine announced July 14, including one for Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.
The local partnerships, which had been developing their own centers before the awards, received separate grants.
The Georgetown-Howard partnership will receive $38.2 million and will involve other institutions in a more limited fashion, including the Washington, D.C. Veterans Affairs Medical Center, MedStar Health Research Institute and the Energy Department’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
Another grant recipient, Children’s National Medical Center with The George Washington University Hospital as a subcontractor, will receive $20 million. Children’s is the first pediatric hospital to receive a grant among the 55 winners since 2006.
The NIH is creating a consortium of all grant winners, an eventual network of 60 centers that specialize in bringing research to patient care quickly and effectively.
“We need a pathway for bright ideas to develop and be nourished and to prosper,” said Dr. Anthony Hayward, associate director of the NIH’s Division for Clinical Research Resources.
“NIH was concerned that clinical research that targets health problems had become very ‘siloed,’ working inside of disciplinary boundaries and institutional boundaries in ways that didn’t serve the public,” said Dr. Jill Joseph, principal investigator and director of the Children’s center.
For instance, it was biochemists, not cardiologists, who developed the lineup of drugs to reduce cholesterol levels, opening a new front in battling cardiovascular disease. And some of the most pressing dilemmas of modern medicine involve demographic groups unlikely to find their way to a clinical testing environment inside a research hospital.
“Teams of scientists and investigators, working across different disciplines is going to be the way that much of the further advances in knowledge about treating disease ... are going to be developed,” Verbalis said. “And [the grants] not just allow that to happen, but act to facilitate the advances.”
Children’s is searching for locations in D.C.’s NoMa area to lease a floor and is also planning to construct a research building somewhere in D.C., Joseph said. The Georgetown-Howard partnership will make improvements to existing space at its hospitals to house its centers.
By integrating multiple universities and hospitals into the same centers and becoming part of the national consortium, researchers and doctors hope to “harmonize and unify” the regulatory bodies that oversee research at each institution, said Dr. Tom Mellman, Howard University College of Medicine’s associate dean for clinical and translational research.
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