NIH awards $700M to speed translational research at centers nationwide

The NIH this week announced the first 12 participants in a new national consortium charged with speeding the translation of cutting-edge research into clinical practice. The grants will award 12 universities approximately $700 million over the next five years, with plans to distribute an additional $500 million to as many as 60 academic medical centers by 2012. As part of the network, centers will act as “discovery engines” that pool research data to identify scientific discoveries and apply them to real-world patient care, emphasizing improvements among underserved populations, interdisciplinary collaboration among scientists and providers, and the development of clinical informatics tools. For example, the University of California-Davis plans to use its $24.8 million grant to study chronic disease management and establish a new center for clinical and translational research, while the University of Pittsburgh will launch a patient registry program that can be tapped to identify candidates for clinical trials. The director of the NIH notes that the program marks the “first systematic change in our approach to clinical research in 50 years” (NIH release, 10/3; Neergard, AP/Yahoo! News, 10/3; Portland Business Journal, 10/3).