Center for Clinical and Translational Science

The Rockefeller University Center for Clinical and Translational Science (CCTS) submitted a Clinical and Translational Science Award application on September 25, 2015 to the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). CCTS has been continuously funded by the Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) program since the inception of the program in 2006, including a successful renewal application in 2011. The grant supports the University’s high quality translational and clinical research infrastructure that facilitates research locally, regionally and nationally and fosters innovation in research methods, training, and career development.

NCATS has set the goal of catalyzing the development of methods and technologies that lead to more efficient translation of biomedical discoveries into interventions shown to improve health. To that end, the CTSA program is focused on developing into a fully integrated research and training environment for clinical and translational sciences that aims to dramatically improve efficiency and quality across the translational research spectrum.

The overall vision of the Rockefeller University Center for Clinical and Translational Science (CCTS), supported by the CTSA program, is to develop, demonstrate, and disseminate innovative programs to achieve translational success and to integrate these into a seamless “Learning Clinical Research Enterprise” that uses outcome data to drive quality improvement for the benefit of human health. To achieve this vision CCTS proposed to enhance our existing programs and add new ones.

The Specific Aims of the proposal define the future direction of CCTS. 1. To integrate our existing and new programs into a Translational Research Navigation (TRN) Program that encourages, facilitates, and insures the integrity of all human subjects research from conception to conclusion, and that will expedite our participation in the CTSA network of multi-center studies. 2. To integrate our existing and new programs into a Translational Workforce Educational Program that insures that all members of the translational workforce have the knowledge and skills required for them to perform their functions individually and as members of diverse scientific teams. 3. To integrate our existing and new programs into a From Discovery to Health-Enhancing Product Program to insure that investigators have the resources to maximize the likelihood that they can translate their novel discoveries into products that improve human health.

To achieve the vision embodied in these Specific Aims, CCTS will:

1.     Integrate our Community Engaged Navigation, Protocol Navigation, Research Participant Engagement in Protocol Priorities and Design, Basic Scientist Outreach, Mutually Aligned Community Engaged/ Mechanistic Science, Centralized Recruitment and Research Volunteer Repository, Ontology-Backed Phenotyping, and Research Participant Perception programs with a new Protocol Implementation Navigation program into an overarching TRN program under a new administrative structure with senior leadership. TRN will be supported by an integrated Informatics infrastructure adopting best practices and NIH and CTSA data standards. TRN will support both local protocols and CTSA network protocols with TRN leadership serving on the Liaisons to the Trial and Recruitment Innovation Centers.

2.     Integrate our extensive current educational programs, including the KL2 Clinical Scholars program, with new educational initiatives to: prepare community clinicians to participate in research teams, enhance Clinical Research Nursing training, provide a full range of educational experiences in translating scientific discoveries into health-enhancing products, develop ontology-backed phenotyping instruments, and query large electronic health record databases to test scientific hypotheses at the population level.

3.     Integrate the new Tri-Institutional Therapeutic Development Institute, which provides access to medicinal chemists and drug project management, with the CCTS Pilot program, the Rockefeller scientific resource centers, the New York Genome Center, the new Robertson Therapeutic Development Fund, the TRN program, and the CCTS Hospital to enable investigators to traverse the Valley of Death through Phase 1/2 studies. Outcome metrics will drive performance improvement throughout. The three diagrams below provide a pictorial summary of these initiatives.