STANFORD, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--A large federal grant recognizing the Stanford University School of Medicine’s potential to translate laboratory discoveries into advances in health care has placed the school among a core group of academic medical centers funded to crack this surprisingly hard problem.
The National Institutes of Health announced today that the school will receive a Clinical and Translational Science Award of $30 million over five years. The award links Stanford to the CTSA consortium of 38 academic health centers working to speed medical progress, each according to its own strategy.
Stanford’s approach will focus on interdisciplinary connections between the medical school, the rest of the campus and innovators in business based in Silicon Valley. The crux of the effort will be the Stanford Center for Clinical and Translational Education and Research, an independent institute that will operate outside traditional school boundaries.
“Translating discoveries is more than the School of Medicine,” said the program’s leader, Harry Greenberg, MD, the medical school’s senior associate dean for research. “You need lawyers, psychologists, anthropologists, economists, environmental scientists — all of these — to figure how best to move scientific discoveries into improvements in human health and well-being. What’s unique about Stanford is we can harness the best in those areas.”
The NIH launched the award program in 2006 with 12 centers, added 12 more the following year and 14 this year. Ultimately it aims to fund approximately 60 centers with an annual budget of $500 million.
Most of the grantees so far are traditional academic health centers, with allied health schools such as public health, nursing, pharmacy and dentistry.
“Stanford has none of these,” said Greenberg. “What we have are highly integrated experts working outside of traditional medicine.”
The NIH established the grant program in 2006 to solve a problem that seems inexplicable to many outside of the medical profession: Despite an explosion in discoveries about human biology, only a small fraction of these insights lead to advances in health care. Part of the problem is that medical school programs tend to be very specialized, with faculty and students focusing either on understanding the basic functions of organisms, or treating patients. There’s little incentive to launch risky, time-consuming projects that bridge these two worlds.
“The NIH is trying to take the nation’s largely unorganized way of conducting clinical research and bring innovative strategies together in one program, with more centralized direction and management,” said Greenberg.
As a result of the grant, the new Stanford center, known as SCCTER (pronounced “skeeter”), will roll out new programs and services designed to break researchers out of their siloed communities. The center will be based in a new building, the Jill and John Freidenrich Center for Translational Research, to be located just a few minutes’ walk from the medical school — and from Stanford Hospital and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital — at 800 Welch Road in Palo Alto. The building is slated for completion by the end of 2011 and is funded by a gift from the Freidenrichs.
“The CTSA will provide a catalyst to knit together diverse interdisciplinary programs that might not otherwise have focused on translational and clinical research,” said Philip Pizzo, MD, dean of the School of Medicine. “While the funding is important to this effort, so is the organizational structure that will foster new alliances and collaborations within Stanford as well as with its community.”
“Research related to human health takes place all over our campus, not just at the medical school,” said Ann Arvin, MD, Stanford’s vice provost and dean of research. “This CTSA is going to be a terrific resource for all of these programs. It will benefit many faculty researchers and their trainees at Stanford.”
The grant will support Stanford’s efforts to expand and tie together existing programs and develop some new ones. Among the highlights:
* Grants for early-stage research aimed at improving health, with priority given to interdisciplinary projects with researchers outside of the medical school. * Two “technology accelerator” programs, one for medical technology and the other for drugs and diagnostics, that will advise faculty and students on how to develop their inventions and foster partnerships with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. These programs will build on Stanford’s already successful efforts such as the Biodesign Program, which trains students and fellows in medicine, engineering and business to develop biomedical devices, and the SPARK program, which provides a year of funding for promising biomedical projects and mentoring by faculty with company experience. * Approximately six fellowships in technology transfer per year. * A community office to improve access to clinical trials and to increase the flow of information about the trials’ outcomes back to participants. * Expanded support for researchers undertaking a clinical trial, including guidance in trial design, clinical informatics, biostatistics, the institutional and governmental regulatory process, and new resources for human genetics, tissue microarray histology and immune monitoring. * Administrative staff to coordinate activities at Stanford’s independent institutes and programs doing work relating to human health. Among these are programs based at the medical school, such as the Masters of Medicine program, which gives PhD candidates exposure to clinical medicine, and the Advanced Residency Training at Stanford program, which allows clinical fellows to pursue graduate training en route to becoming physician-scientists. But the SCCTER program will also link programs based outside the medical school, such as the Stanford Center for Longevity, the Woods Institute for the Environment, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and BioX, the interdisciplinary biomedical research program.
The program’s co-directors are Philip Lavori, PhD, professor of biostatistics and chair of health research and policy; Charles Prober, MD, professor of pediatrics and senior associate dean for medical student education; Branimir Sikic, MD, professor of oncology; and David Stevenson, MD, professor of pediatrics and senior associate dean of academic affairs.
The grant will allow Stanford researchers to make great advances for health care, Pizzo said. “Stanford’s spectrum of medical, social, engineering, business and related disciplines should propel the CTSA to new vistas that are simply not possible at other medical centers, medical schools or universities,” he said.
Stanford University Medical Center integrates research, medical education and patient care at its three institutions — Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford Hospital & Clinics and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford. For more information, please visit the Web site of the medical center’s Office of Communication & Public Affairs at http://mednews.stanford.edu. Contacts
Stanford University Medical Center Rosanne Spector, 650-725-5374 (Print Media) manishma@stanford.edu M.A. Malone, 650-723-6912 (Broadcast Media) mamalone@stanford.edu
