NIH expands national CTSA consortium with 14 new awards

NIH expands national CTSA consortium with 14 new awards

Fourteen academic health centers in 11 states are the latest members of the National Institutes of Health’s Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) consortium. These fourteen institutions will receive $533 million over 5 years to help researchers turn laboratory discoveries into treatments for patients. Creating a unique network of medical research institutions across the nation, the consortium is working to reduce the time it takes for laboratory discoveries to become treatments for patients and to engage communities in clinical research efforts. It also is addressing the critical need to train the next generation of clinical and translational researchers. The consortium is led by the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR), a component of the NIH.

The institutions receiving new CTSA funding are listed below. Descriptions of the CTSA awardees are posted at www.ncrr.nih.gov/ctsa2008:

      Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University (New York City, NY)
      Boston University (Boston, MA)
      Harvard University (Cambridge, MA)
      Indiana University School of Medicine (Indianapolis, IN)
      Northwestern University (Chicago and Evanston, IL)
      The Ohio State University (Columbus, OH)
      The Scripps Research Institute (La Jolla, CA)
      Stanford University (Palo Alto, CA)
      Tufts University (Boston, MA)
      The University of Alabama at Birmingham (Birmingham, AL)
      University of Colorado Denver (Aurora, CO)
      The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Chapel Hill, NC)
      The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (San Antonio, TX)
      The University of Utah (Salt Lake City, UT)

These 14 academic health centers join 24 others announced in 2006 and 2007. The 2008 CTSA grants expand state representation in the consortium to Alabama, Colorado, Indiana, Massachusetts, and Utah.

The CTSA initiative grew out of the NIH commitment to re-engineer the clinical research enterprise, one of the key objectives of the NIH Roadmap for Medical Research. Most of the funding is coming from terminating grants to General Clinical Research Centers, supplemented by NIH Roadmap funds. In 2012 when the program is fully implemented, approximately 60 CTSAs will be connected with an annual budget of $500 million.

MUSC will be submitting a new application to the CTSA Initiative in October 2008. For more information about the CTSA program, visit www.ncrr.nih.gov/crctsa.

Source: NIH news release, May 29, 2008.