Academic medical centers have long found it challenging to translate the ideas and insights discovered in the clinic or at the research bench into practical applications. Many discoveries could advance diagnosis and treatment of disease, but this typically requires developing and marketing a drug or device. This has traditionally been the domain of the private sector.

But now, academia and the private sector are increasingly recognizing each other's unique strengths and are discovering new ways to work together. The practice of advancing healthcare innovations from research to clinical care has begun to mirror what is happening in other industries: strategic alliances and partnerships to move innovations forward in a time of scarce resources.

"This trend is coming from a growing realization that collaborations will benefit both industry and academia," says Dr. John Fahy, director of the UCSF Airway Center and a veteran both of these new-style partnerships and the more traditional clinical research that involves industry sponsors. "This is a crucial part of translational science."

Equally important, many of these collaborative efforts provide an opportunity for UCSF to build internal resources that will long outlive the original partnerships.

Neurotrauma Critical Care Data Repository

The treatment of critically ill and injured patients has greatly advanced in recent years. Yet the ever-increasing amount of clinical data from physiological sensors, bedside equipment, and laboratory tests now exceeds staff's ability to record and process this information. In fact, while the monitors, instruments, and plethora of tubes in a critical care unit may look very high-tech, "treating neurological trauma is about where cardiac medicine was in the 1950s," says Geoffrey T. Manley, MD, PhD, chief of neurotrauma in UCSF's Department of Neurological Surgery.

Most of the devices don't communicate with each other or operate on a common information platform. Therefore, staff must use paper bedside charts to record data, just as they did 50 years ago. As a result, there are no validated standards for brain monitoring and treatment in critical care.

"Without communication standards, trying to collect data from four or five different monitors is a daunting task," Dr. Manley says, "and there's no good way of analyzing the physiological data from a large number of patients to learn which factors are predictive of patient outcome. If we're going to translate our research findings into
the clinical arena, we have to get beyond the era of using pencils and paper to record all this information."

"60,000 people die from brain trauma a year," he adds. "Another 100,000 die from medical errors, many of which are preventable with information technology. There needs to be a paradigm shift in the way we collect and analyze information in the ICU."

In order to create that shift, Dr. Manley needed to find an industry partner who could help him bring more up-to-date computer technology into the ICU. He consulted Teri Melese, PhD, director of Research Technologies and Alliances at the School of Medicine Dean's Office, who connected him with Intel Corporation's Digital Health Group.

When the Digital Health Group's CTO Doug Busch and Chief of Staff Michael Bassett met with Manley, "we hit it off right away," he says. "Our interests were clearly aligned."

Together, Manley, the Intel executives, and computer scientists at UCB set up a project by which they are creating a warehouse for critical care data and bioinformatics and novel computational techniques to harness it. "This will allow us to start seeing relationships within complex data that weren't known before," Manley says. "Understanding those relationships will affect how we treat patients.

In fact, the team discovered an important dose-response relationship for a drug commonly used to treat brain swelling that has eluded investigators for years. "Without the use of the high-frequency ICU data we are now able to collect, this would have never been possible," Manley says.

Ultimately, Manley says, the project will fuel the development of a new generation of ICU information systems to improve the diagnosis, treatment, and outcome of critically ill and injured patients.


Next Page: What does Intel get out of the partnership?

Source: Susan Davis