Newswise COLUMBUS, Ohio The National Institutes of Health has awarded a $25.4 million grant to The Ohio State University Center for Clinical and Translational Science (CCTS), a collaboration between The Ohio State University and Nationwide Childrens Hospital (NCH) created to accelerate basic science discoveries into life-saving medical advances.

This award is a confirmation that Ohio State has successfully created a strong clinical and translational research environment where basic scientists and clinicians can leverage the resources of a nationally recognized pediatric hospital, Ohio States Wexner Medical Center, seven health science colleges, as well as other resources from one of the largest public universities in the nation, said Charles Lockwood, MD, Dean of the Ohio State University College of Medicine. We find that the barriers to such multidisciplinary research collaboration are virtually non-existent here.

The NIHs endowment is funding of a multi-million dollar Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) that was originally given to the CCTS in 2008. Since then, the Center has helped connect hundreds of researchers across the state of Ohio with the resources needed to discover new techniques and treatments for todays deadliest and costliest diseases including obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and Alzheimers, as well as a variety of disabling childhood illnesses like muscular dystrophy.

Steven Gabbe, MD, chief executive officer of OSUs Wexner Medical Center, believes one reason that the CCTS program has been successful is that leaders from both Ohio State and Nationwide Childrens Hospital recognize how important translational research and training clinician-scientists is to the evolution of healthcare.

Translational research is critical to our mission of transforming sick care into healthcare, and were committed to creating an environment where discovery fuels innovation in patient care, Gabbe said. The design of the new James Cancer Hospital and Solove Research Institute and Critical Care Center is an excellent example of this. It combines research and education space on every patient care floor, which will accelerate the creation of new diagnostic tools and treatments.

Both the Ohio State and Nationwide Childrens campuses have dedicated substantial resources and infrastructure to grow our translational research capabilities, said John Barnard, MD, President of The Research Institute at Nationwide Childrens . This investment has delivered some major breakthroughs, particularly with gene therapy for some of the most deadly and debilitating muscular diseases. Our partnership is giving us new insights in the continuum of care as children with chronic disease grow into adults , and offering new possibilities for preventing disease altogether.

The CCTS has been also been successful in creating partnerships, infrastructure and programs that drive innovation, training the next generation of scientists, and making the research process more efficient three of the NIHs key goals.

Earlier this year, we signed an historic agreement that includes the two other institutions in the Ohio CTSA network and their partners that centralized our review process, making it dramatically easier for our researchers to collaborate with seven different facilities across the state, noted Rebecca Jackson, MD, director of the Ohio State CCTS. We also joined six other Midwest CTSAs to create a regional consortium that minimizes duplication and makes data capture for multi-site studies more standardized and efficient.

The CCTS facilitated the development of a similar network of institutional partners in Appalachia the Appalachian Translational Research Network which is focused on addressing the significant health challenges and disparities specific to Appalachia.

The CCTS has also helped created shared research resources with sustainability in mind. Two of these resources include the Clinical Research Center, a full service research laboratory, and the Laser Capture Microdissection Core, a lab that collects precise, nano-sized tissue samples. The services were originally fully-funded by the CCTS, but by building them around a sustainable business model, both are close to being self-sufficient operations and are used by researchers across campus.

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$25.4 Million Awarded to Ohio State to Continue Critical "Bench to Bedside" Translational Research

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