Illinois Medicine

cover story by Kevin McKeough Transformer The Rise of a The CCTS connects people from across the University of Illinois, including the researchers, staff and administrators pictured to the right. With help of a $20 million NIH grant, the UIC Center for Clinical and Translational Sciences is helping change research at the university S 20 | SPRING 2 010 everal years ago, the National Institutes of Health (First row: L-R) Andrea Carnegie, PhD, visiting center coordinator, CCTS Mary Kapella, PhD, RN, research assistant professor, behavior health science asked a question: What would it take to develop teams of investigators from various fields of research to work across disciplines with the goal of more quickly translating scientific breakthroughs into treatments for patients in the clinic? The answer was the Clinical Translational Science Award, an NIH National Center for Research Resources program that is funding a national consortium of medical research insti- tutions that have the capacity to transform the efficiency and quality of clinical and transla- tional research. Last July, the center awarded the University of Illinois at Chicago Center for Clinical and Translational Sciences a grant of $20 million over five years, the largest grant in UIC's history. The grant provided a major affirmation and increase in capabilities for the CCTS (www. uic.edu/depts/mcam/CCTS/CCTS-home.html), which was established in 2007 with university funding. Housed on two floors of the Medical Center Administration Building, the center fosters innovative and collaborative health research efforts across the UIC campus and across clinical disciplines, research inquiries and methodologies. It provides health researchers with financial, clinical and technical support and educates investigators in research methods—researchers working in conjunction with the center are investigating issues ranging from the role of an enzyme in ischemic heart disease to the development of new devices to evaluate diseases of the retina. "The NIH's decision to include UIC in this important effort is a recognition of the strength of the university's research endeavors and the university's crucial role in providing health services to the Chicago area," says Michael Tanner, PhD, UIC provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs. "This grant will enable UIC's research and clini- cal efforts to have an even greater impact, increasing the capacities of the immensely talented researchers working here and encouraging more collaboration between them." With six health science colleges and more than 100 research centers, UIC provides fertile ground for nurtur- ing the movement of knowledge from the laboratory bench to the patient bedside. As of July 2009, more than 2,300 human health research projects were under way at the university, supported in part by 373 NIH grants totaling more than $127 million per year. Overall research expenditures at the university totaled more than $335 million in 2009. Theodore Mazzone, MD, director of the CCTS, is quick to point out that the center is a cross-campus effort. "The College of Medicine has been instrumental in getting the center off the ground and providing important resources and leadership, but all of the university's health science colleges and a number of colleges on the univer- sity's east campus also provide leadership and important services," says Mazzone, chief of the section of endocrinol- ogy, diabetes and metabolism and professor of medicine and pharmacology. The center's collaborators also include Illinois Medicine sites in Peoria, Rockford and Urbana-Champaign, Advocate Health Care and the Jesse Brown VA Medical Center. "There might be researchers who are working on the same topic and not know it because they're separated. The idea of translational research is to break down geographic, academic, administrative and technical boundaries (Second row: L-R) Robin Mermelstein, PhD, director, Institute for Health Research and Policy, and director, CCTS novel translational and collaborative studies program Michael Berbaum, PhD, CCTS design and analysis core, and senior biostatistician, Institute for Health Research and Policy Shane Phillips, PT, PhD, CCTS KL2 Scholar, assistant professor, physical therapy (Third row: L-R) Weihua Gao, MS, design and analysis specialist, CCTS design and analysis core Theodore Mazzone, MD, director, CCTS, and professor of medicine Annette Valenta, DPh, associate director, CCTS biomedical informatics core (Fourth row: L-R) Danyelle Martin, PECTS Fellow, CCTS TL1 trainee, department of microbiology and immunology Mark Stein, PhD, director, CCTS regulatory support and advocacy core Yunbo Ke, PhD, CCTS pilot grant recipient, research assistant professor, department of physiology and biophysics (Fifth row: L-R) Andrew Boyd, MD, lead health informatician, CCTS biomedical informatics core Birute Petrauskas, visiting center coordinator, CCTS research, education and careers in health program Sharmilee Nyenhuis, MD, assistant professor, CCTS KL2 Scholar, pulmonary, critical care and sleep medicine PEOPLE PHOTOS: SUSAN REICH

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