The National Institutes of Health renews Pitt grant

The National Institutes of Health has granted Pitt more funding to help speed the movement of… The National Institutes of Health has granted Pitt more funding to help speed the movement of laboratory discoveries into clinical practices.

The NIH has renewed its funding with a $67.3 million grant for Pitt’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute to continue research over the next five years.

CTSI is one of 10 institutes in the country to receive renewed funding with a grant through the Clinical and Translational Awards program, which was established by the NIH and is administered by the National Center for Research Resources.

The grant will go toward funding recently established programs and pilot studies at CTSI, which is part of the University of Pittsburgh’s Medical Center.

CTSI co-director Dr. Michelle Broido said the institute focuses on translational research, or applying laboratory-based discoveries to clinical research and eventually putting them into practice, a process she described as very extensive.

“When the NIH established the [Clinical and Translational Awards] program, the idea was to use the award to build an infrastructure that would be necessary to allow translational and clinical research to thrive,” she said. “We’ve built 10 different core areas and now we’re focusing on turning it all into one working machine.”

“[NIH] realized that clinical research needed an academic home,” Dr. Anthony Hayward, assistant director of the NCRR, said about the purpose of the grant.

CTSI casts a wide net over Pitt’s existing labs in biomedical research and health care. It encompasses all six schools of health and sciences and collaborates with local institutes such as Carnegie Mellon University, the Urban League of Greater Pittsburgh and the Research and Development Corporation.

NIH gave its first grant of $83.5 million to CTSI in 2006. Broido said the money was used to create the specialized research cores within CTSI, each of which focuses on different ways to incorporate and educate community members, researchers, clinicians and patients in studies and experiments.

She said that one main areas of focus is the Community PARTners Program, which aims to engage the community in CTSI’s research studies. CTSI recruits the community to participate in their research trials and also seeks to keep them educated on current research as well as keep researches educated on the needs and wants of the community.

“Facilitating ways for them to participate is just as important as listening to their ideas and developing two-way communication,” Broido said.

Other areas of focus include research education, training and career development, participant and clinical interaction resources, and a center for clinical and translational informatics.

CTSI established an education core to expose and interest students from kindergarten to postgraduate levels to translational science.

“High school students can come in and engage in research and see what it’s like to actually work in a lab and ask questions,” she said. “It helps people to start thinking about the questions that are involved in taking lab-based discoveries to clinical research.”

In one specific education study, Broido said CTSI worked with Pittsburgh’s RAND corporation, a nonprofit research institution, to educate pediatricians on the best ways to help families with young children characterized as obese.

Pitt investigators, who were familiar with this type of research, created a training video for general pediatricians to help them approach the topic of obesity with families, she said.

As part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the NIH spends more than $31.2 billion annually on medical research, according to the NIH website. More than 80 perecent of the funds go towards awarding nearly 50,000 competitive grants to more than 3,000 universities.