What is clinical and translational science?

Clinical and Translational science is aimed at translating results in basic research into results that directly benefit humans. Scientists have ideas about something they would like to test out, and they seek resources for experiments. Most experiments start in the laboratory and this is called “basic research”. Many new treatments are tested in animals before any humans are permitted to try them out. And even then, many types of experiments need to be done before a new medical device or treatment is approved for regular use by your doctor and other clinicians. 

Clinical and translational science involves moving knowledge and discovery gained from the basic sciences to its application in clinical and community settings. This concept is often summarized by the phrases "bench-to-bedside" and "bedside-to-community" research.

For clinical and translational science to be successful, communication must be bi-directional. In other words, many different people have to talk—and listen—to each other: basic researchers and clinical researchers; clinical researchers and human volunteers; patients and their doctors in their communities; and community doctors and clinical researchers.

Clinical and Translational Science at ACTRI

 Overall Goals of the ACTRI

Advance CTS locally, regionally, and nationally through the generation of new rigorous tools, processes, effective practices and knowledge that will elevate our program into a national resource and model for rapidly meeting urgent needs in public health and health equity.

Prioritize key partnerships that co-create solutions to meet local needs by understanding the perspectives and needs of a wide variety of communities that include patients, advocacy groups, community-based organizations, community clinics, research institutes and industry. Additionally, through the creation and stewardship of partnerships locally, regionally, and nationally to ensure that all voices are heard.

Train for the future by developing, implementing, and promoting comprehensive multi-disciplinary competency-based training and career support programs for research professionals of all disciplines and at all levels to enhance their skills, knowledge and professional development to develop and support the next generation of CTS changemakers.

ACTRI utilizes several strategies and processes, that are aligned with NIH Clinical and Translational Science priorities, in order to reach our goals:

• Strategic Management

• Training and Outreach: Workforce Development and Community Engagement

• Generating Clinical and Translational Science Resources and Pilot Programs

• Building Innovative Programs

ACTRI Partnerships

The Clinical and Translational Science Partnership was established as a coordinating center to develop new pathways for clinical investigators to collaborate with basic science researchers outside UC San Diego and to provide new tools for basic scientists across the San Diego region to translate discoveries into new treatments. To accomplish these goals, we have established partnerships with other universities, health care providers, biomedical research organizations, and nonprofit organizations (see below) to do the following:

• Develop programs to foster collaboration and resource-sharing, and decrease barriers to interaction.
• Facilitate technology transfer and development of novel therapies with our partner institutions and industry.

Click here to learn more about the different affiliation types (Collaborator and Partner) and benefits.

Partner Research Institutions

• Eisenhower Health
• El Centro Regional Medical Center
• San Diego Community College District
• Mesa College
• Salk Institute
• Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute
• La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology
• Rady Children's Hospital - San Diego
• VA San Diego Healthcare

National Consortium

The ACTRI is partially funded by a Clinical and Translational Science Awards Program (CTSA) grant from the National Institutes of Health. The mission of the CTSA program is to accelerate discoveries toward better health. The CTSA is a highly competitive, 5-year grant that helps awardees translate research discoveries into commercially available drugs and devices for prevention, diagnosis, or treatment of human diseases and disorders. As the CTSA-funded institutes carry out this mission, we can expect to see an increase in research efficiency, an enhancement in the education of our trainees, and the breaking down of barriers, such as red tape and silo culture, that delay the progress of candidates to market.

UC BRAID

The deans of the five UC medical campuses, in collaboration with the University of California Office of the President (UCOP), have launched an initiative to identify policy changes and areas of collaboration in order to accelerate biomedical research across the campuses. The initiative was named the “UC Biomedical Research Acceleration, Integration, and Development” (UC BRAID) program.

Four initial areas of attention have been identified—Contracting, Informatics, IRB, and Metrics—and working groups have been developed to identify short- and long-term solutions to shared challenges in each of these areas. The groups work diligently to identify policy changes, new infrastructure, or processes that will reduce the barriers to clinical and translational research for each institution, individual researchers, and external partners.

UC BRAID is led by an executive committee of the CTSA Principal Investigators at the San Diego, Los Angeles, Irvine, San Francisco, and Davis campuses. The committee reports to UCOP, and is charged with: 

• Coordinating activities across the biomedical campuses and at the Office of the President to support acceleration of biomedical research
• Evaluating priorities for projects that meet UC BRAID program goals
• Establishing task forces and subcommittees to address priorities
• Making funding recommendations to the deans and UCOP

Click here for more information on UC BRAID.

Strategic Management at ACTRI

Strategic management is how ACTRI makes things work. Our center’s mission, vision, and values guide us, and internal and external input helps us create our operational strategies and goals and evaluate our performance.

Organize, Manage, and Partner: Strategic planning increases efficiency

• Organize an effective and collaborative infrastructure to support scientific, training, governance, and other Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) consortium operations.

• Transparently lead the ACTRI with input from a range of diverse opinions and experiences based on regular needs assessments from partners.

• Ensure broad participation and diverse viewpoints by actively seeking and incorporating input from advisory committees and partners.

Operations and Research Services Unit

Plan and Improve: Broadly engage ACTRI in continual improvement efforts

• Implement forward-thinking planning to ensure our program’s success and continuity, including process improvement, plans for succession, and times of emergencies.

Evaluation and Tracking

• Regularly assess our efforts using CTSA network metrics and the Translational Science Benefits Model (TSBM) and course correct as needed.

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  • Image taken from https://translationalsciencebenefits.wustl.edu 

     

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Connected, Translational, and Impactful: How ACTRI “discovers, develops, and disseminates” best practices to enhance CTS research locally (UCSD & partners), regionally (UC BRAID), and nationally (CTSA consortium)

• Develop, test, and implement programs across the CTSA network, with our partner institutions, and our UC Biomedical Research Acceleration Integration & Development (BRAID) consortium.

ACTRI Partners

•  Effectively use our Hub Liaison Team (HLT) as the interface between the CTSA network and ACTRI, leveraging the coordinating centers, funding opportunities, and governance structures at ACTRI as an evidence base for each endeavor.

• Rapidly disseminate scientific discoveries to improve health and health equity via our Dissemination and Implementation Science Center (DISC)

Training and Outreach at ACTRI

ACTRI focuses on workforce development and community and stakeholder involvement to help streamline and accelerate the CTS process. This is done through leveraging Good Clinical Practice (GCP) to educate and train CTS research team members, investigators, coordinators, and data managers. Thus creating a broad and varied translational workforce that can tackle problems across disciplines. Additionally, involving communities and stakeholders to ensure the decision being made and research being conducted is meaningful to those impacted.

Workforce Development for Clinical Research Staff Professionals 

• To provide comprehensive training, education, and mentoring opportunities for members of CTS research teams and other clinical professionals to enhance their skills in CTS.

 

• To develop and implement innovative approaches to disseminate educational content in CTS, such as the use of interactive online platforms, to optimize learning experiences.

• To increase the participation and representation of underrepresented populations in education and training activities by identifying and implementing culturally and linguistically appropriate strategies to engage hard-to-reach communities.

Community and Stakeholder Engagement Research 

• To conduct observational or interventional studies to determine the most effective strategies for building trust, increasing membership on teams, and promoting participation in clinical research and trials among patients and communities.

• To identify and disseminate fundamental principles of successful patient and community participation to increase engagement and adherence in translational research studies.

• To develop educational and training resources for clinical professionals on best practices for patient and community engagement, as well as evidence-based tools and resources to increase participation of underrepresented communities in translational research studies. This includes collaborating with other CTSA hubs to identify and adopt new tools, implement methodological innovations, provide tailored materials, and establish evidence-based interventions to achieve health equity among underrepresented groups.

Clinical and Translational Science Resources and Pilots at ACTRI

 ACTRI recognizes that researchers face regulatory and practical obstacles to translating scientific discoveries into clinically useful diagnostics and therapeutics. We work to remove these roadblocks by equipping researchers with tools, developing novel approaches, and building and providing a comprehensive enterprise informatics infrastructure.

Resources and Services (R&S): Provide resources and services to support the translation of science to humans with a focus on health equity and the participation of underserved populations

• Provide data science, research design, and analytical support, guidance and training to enhance the quality and rigor of our research.

• Centralize information on regulations, IRB processes, templates, clinical trial billing coverage analysis, contracting, conflift of interest, and biosafety review and training through our web-based Research Compass.

ACTRI Research Compass   

• Enhance the quality of regulatory submissions through guidance and training by our Regulatory Knowledge and Support (RKS) team, including the use of information technology, game-based training for improved IRB protocols, informed consents, reliance agreements, central IRB support, and compliance with regulatory standards like clinicaltrials.gov, Good Clinical Practice (GCP), adverse event reporting.

EDUCATION AND TRAINING   

• Empower community partnerships through culturally appropriate engagement and welcoming spaces. Building on existing strengths and relationships, we will meet communities where they live to help identify needs, provide engagement services, and solicit community feedback and review for all ACTRI services, outreach, pilot grants, and training efforts.

Community Research Partnership UNIT  

• Support human-centered research, including community engagement, participant engagement, nursing, pharmacy, laboratory, imaging, biorepository, and specialized infrastructure.

 Population Science and Community Engagement  

• CTS Pilot Program: Develop innovative research methodologies that advance CTS with generalizable principles that improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the translation process with a focus on early-stage development of new therapies or technologies that have a generalizable application while being validated in a particular use case.

• Health Informatics: Establish an enterprise informatics infrastructure to provide investigator teams user-friendly efficient access to real world data from EHR records, wearable devices, patient reported information systems. The infrastructure promotes secure data management, storage, and analysis with a focus on improving the quality of research and promoting open science principles.

Biomedical Informatics UNIT  

Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics  

• Establish a user-friendly and secure data management infrastructure. This includes creating and maintaining secure systems, providing technology support, and educating users and learners.

• Develop and implement data processing methods that optimize data storage, processing, and analysis and that manage data provenance to ensure data quality.

Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Research Design Unit  

• Provide advanced data mining, visualization, and analytics tools and platforms, allowing researchers to derive valuable insights from data

• Facilitate the use of ontologies and common data elements (CDEs) to standardize annotation and improve interoperability. 

Focusing on operational excellence at its core, ACTRI's Operations and Research Services unit offers a wide range of consultative services, project management expertise, and business system support to all ACTRI centers, units, and partner institutions. This includes process improvement and workflow automation, data analytics & leadership reporting, as well as CTSA grant management and progress tracking.

Operations & Research Services (ORS) serves as the administrative home for a variety of programmatic functions:

• Administrative Operations: Human resources, facilities management, CTSA grant administration, and communications.

• Research Transformation: Optimizing research processes, including service portfolio management and process improvement.

• Data/Analytics: Data integration across ACTRI units, dashboard creation and management, and business intelligence strategy.

• Project Management: Embeds Project Managers/analysts within ACTRI units, delivers programmatic support and cross-functional communication while providing administrative support from the ORS team.

By integrating these critical administrative positions, ACTRI reduces silos of staff supporting individual programs and gives dedicated staff supervision to team members. It allows cross-training and team-oriented approaches to address ACTRI-wide needs.

Location & Contacts

ACTRI Office:

Email: CRSI-Navigator@health.ucsd.edu

ACTRI Research Clinic:

Front Desk: (858) 534-1251

Mailing Address:

Altman Clinical and Translational Research Institute Building
9500 Gilman Drive, MC 0990
La Jolla, CA 92093-0990

Physical Address:

Altman Clinical and Translational Research Institute Building
9452 Medical Center Drive
La Jolla, CA 92037

Click here for larger, printable map

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