Photo: Majed

Getting an entire university to readjust its focus, its infrastructure, and its educational mandate is an enormous task, one that is rarely undertaken. Yet that's exactly the effort that UCSF is embarking on this fall, supported by more than $100 million over the next five years from the National Institutes of Health.

The goal is to increase UCSF's leadership in what is known as "translational science" -- or the conversion of scientific discoveries from laboratories into practical medical advances for the patients and communities who need them most.

Despite explosive gains in the medical community's understanding of human disease, the meaningful translation of that knowledge into treating patients, improving health, and preventing disease has gone more slowly.

Advancing translational science has been a goal for many UCSF researchers. "This effort has engaged the enthusiastic support of faculty across all schools and multiple disciplines in the university," notes Joseph "Mike" McCune, MD, PhD, senior associate dean for clinical and translational research and principal investigator for the NIH Clinical and Translational Science Award application (see info box at bottom).

"More than 200 people here have been involved in the planning," McCune continues. "They contributed ideas and a tremendous amount of energy. The resulting vision is both inclusive and expansive."

NIH Director Elias Zerhouni says the effort, initially at UCSF and 11 other institutions, represents "the first systematic change in our approach to clinical research in 50 years."

Translational Research To accelerate the pace at which discoveries in basic science can serve the health of our patients and our community, UCSF is establishing a Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI). The Institute will spearhead a cultural transformation of research and education in clinical investigation and translational science. Following the impetus of the NIH Roadmap, the CTSI will be the nexus around which UCSF is positioning itself towards the future of biomedical research.

Goals and Mission

The mission of CTSI will be to create an academic "home" where researchers can learn about and carry out patient- and disease-oriented research. Among the primary goals of the institute will be to enhance the university's training programs, to build an infrastructure for translational and clinical research, and to create career development programs that will attract the best researchers into the field.

Supporting all of these activities will be a web-based virtual "home," designed to foster both greater communication among researchers at UCSF and greater collaboration between researchers and medical practitioners in surrounding communities and the rest of the world (see Community Engagement Program.)

These efforts are not new to UCSF. As such, their future success will be greatly aided by existing groundwork that has been established over the years. Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Eugene Washington, for example, has developed a number of cross-disciplinary groups to address issues associated with the conduct of clinical and translational research, such as career advancement, regulatory knowledge, and access to translational technologies.

Additionally, UCSF's highly successful adult clinical research centers at San Francisco General Hospital and Moffitt Hospital and the pediatric clinical research center at Moffitt Hospital will be reorganized as a single administrative unit in the CTSI and expanded to include satellite centers in the community (see Clinical Research Center Program).

UCSF's nationally recognized teaching programs in clinical research methods will be expanded to include new training programs in translational research (see Clinical & Translational Sciences Training Program).

"The establishment of CTSI will help us to enhance and to extend these efforts to an even broader range of translational and clinical research," McCune says. "This, in turn, should allow us to more quickly apply important discoveries in the lab to the prevention, treatment, or cure of human disease in the clinic and in the community."

The CTSI plan includes 13 programs, each of which will be led by senior scientists drawn from all four of the university's health science schools (Dentistry, Medicine, Nursing, and Pharmacy) and the Graduate Division.

The San Francisco Veteran's Administration Medical Center, San Francisco Department of Public Health, Kaiser Permanente, and the Children's Hospital of Oakland Research Institute are also collaborating in the endeavor.

Funding for the multimillion-dollar transformation will come from UCSF, private and corporate philanthropy, and from a major grant from the National Institutes of Health.

Source: Susan Davis