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The newspaper of The Johns Hopkins University September 24, 2007 | Vol. 37 No. 4
 
JHU Joins Consortium to Speed Research From Clinic to Community

By Christen Brownlee
Johns Hopkins Medicine

The Johns Hopkins University announced last week that it has received an award of more than $100 million spread over five years to initiate the Johns Hopkins Institute for Clinical and Translational Research. The ICTR will be tasked with enabling Johns Hopkins researchers to hasten and improve the process of getting promising research from the lab to the clinic and eventually to the community.

"This grant is an acknowledgment of the breadth and quality of clinical and translational research here at Johns Hopkins and represents another recognition of Johns Hopkins' commitment to innovation," said Daniel Ford, vice dean for clinical investigation at the School of Medicine.

The grant, supported by the Clinical and Translational Science Awards, a program led by the National Center for Research Resources, part of the National Institutes of Health, will provide support to more than 100 faculty members throughout the university, including the schools of Medicine, Engineering, Nursing and Public Health.

As a Clinical and Translational Science Awards recipient, Johns Hopkins will join a consortium aimed at transforming how clinical and translational research is conducted at academic health centers around the country. Currently, 12 centers make up the consortium; this round of awards adds 12 more.

The funding is intended to allow academic medical centers to form relationships within the consortium as well as partner with outside organizations involved with health care throughout the nation. Contributions from Johns Hopkins and other schools will enable the consortium to provide enriched environments for training researchers to translate their discoveries into clinical trials and ultimately into practice.

The Johns Hopkins Institute for Clinical and Translational Research will use consortium funds to design new and improved tools for analyzing research data and managing clinical trials; support outreach to underserved populations, local community and advocacy organizations, and health care providers; assemble interdisciplinary teams of scientists; and forge new partnerships with private and public health care organizations, including pharmaceutical companies, Veterans Administration hospitals, health maintenance organizations and state health agencies. "Here at Hopkins, and across the nation, we are producing more basic science discoveries than ever, but we have not been able to translate as many of these discoveries to improving the lives of those with diseases as we would like," Ford said. "Joining this national consortium and starting the ICTR will allow us to deliver more health to more people more rapidly."

The other academic medical centers joining Johns Hopkins in this round of funding are Case Western Reserve, Emory and Vanderbilt universities; the universities of Chicago, Iowa, Michigan, Washington and Wisconsin; Washington University in St. Louis; University of Texas Southwest Medical Center; and Weill Medical College of Cornell University.

For more information on the Johns Hopkins ICTR, go to ictr.johnshopkins.edu.

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