The Office of Clinical Research will help recruit and hire new faculty and researchers and, in Ahluwalia's words, "become an academic home for clinical and translational research." The office will also coordinate relationships with community-based clinical partners — the hospitals and medical practices where translational research will be implemented and that, in turn, become an invaluable source of feedback on how new treatments and practices actually affect patient care.
The grant application the University filed in March requests funding equivalent to the K12 grants and the General Clinical Research Center grants, plus an additional $6 million to expand the AHC's clinical and translational research efforts. It adds up to a total of $66.2 million over the five years of the grant.
While University leaders are hopeful, they realize that they're competing against CTSA proposals from dozens of other elite institutions. Just seven will receive funding in the first year.
What this money — and the formation of the Office of Clinical Research — will mean for medical and health researchers at the University, says Ahluwalia,is that "they will be able to pick up a phone and dial a number and get a live person on the other end of the line who will direct them to people and resources — from biostatistics to regulatory assistance to patient interaction. And if they get hired and don't have funding for their own research, this will enable them to apply for pilot funding."
The Office of Clinical Research will also play a direct role in training by funding up to 7 clinical research scholars a year — or 22 over the next three years if the University is awarded a CTSA. The funding will provide faculty with sponsored time of up to three years to do research under the mentorship of a University faculty member.
"The backbone of this grant," Ahluwalia says, "will be training and education."
"It's clear that institutions that are great in clinical care are also great in research and in medical education," he says. "There is a strong correlation between these three things. If you want to improve education, you must work directly on that, as we are doing right now in the Medical School and throughout the Academic Health Center — but you must also build new partnerships across the state and improve your research enterprise."