MUSC neurologist and stroke clinic director, Parneet Grewal, M.D., has been awarded the Robert A. Winn Excellence in Clinical Trials Career Development Award. The two-year, $240,000 award was established by the Bristol Myers Squibb foundation, in partnership with Amgen, Gilead Sciences and Genentech, to train the next generation of physician-scientists in the areas of cardiovascular and cardio-metabolic disease, cancer and neuropsychiatry to design and implement clinical trials. Awardees receive rigorous instruction in evidence-based techniques for engaging the community in clinical research and then apply what they have learned to their research project.
“The award trains early-career physician-investigators how to design and lead clinical trials with the lens of a community-focused approach,” said Grewal. “The aim of the award is to train scholars who not only design clinical trials and do clinical research but also excel at recruiting and retaining participants, especially those from low-resource areas with limited access to clinical research.”
Grewal will draw on this training to strengthen community relationships and boost participation in stroke research conducted via the Southeast Collaborative Alliance for Stroke Trials (SE-CoAST), a regional coordinating center for NIH StrokeNet that includes sites in South Carolina, Georgia and North Carolina. SE-CoAST has eight active NIH-funded clinical trials.
The Winn Career Development Award also places a great emphasis on mentoring, adopting a tiered approach, asking recipients to both be mentored and to mentor. Grewal’s primary mentor is Tanya N. Turan, M.D., who is the principal investigator (PI) of SE-CoAST and directs medical management for the CAPTIVA trial. She and Grewal will meet regularly to discuss best practices in clinical trials and her progress with the project. Other mentors include MUSC professor emeritus Marc I. Chimowitz, MBChB, MUSC epidemiologist Daniel T. Lackland, DrPH and MUSC Vascular Neurology Division Director and SE-CoAST Co-PI, Christine A. Holmstedt, DO. In turn, Grewal will have the opportunity to mentor medical students in the 8-week Winn Clinical Investigator Pathway Program, with the aim of igniting their interest in stroke and cardiovascular clinical research.
For her project, Grewal aims to create a community advisory board for SE-CoAST to encourage community partnerships and feedback on stroke research. Stroke trials are particularly difficult to recruit for, since patients contend not only with usual barriers such as transportation costs but also with physical disabilities and mood disorders resulting from the stroke. The community advisory board will be made up of local community members and community-based organizations, who can provide insight into patient, caregiver and research needs and offer advice on how to build a community-focused research model.
“The community advisory board will work with all SE-COAST sites to assess current clinical trial recruitment and brainstorm how to get more stroke patients engaged in trials and how we can help to retain participants,” said Grewal. The community advisory board that Grewal creates will last long past her project ends, continuing to strengthen ties between stroke researchers and the community.
Grewal will also conduct focus group interviews with stroke survivors and caregivers to learn more about which factors prevent or encourage participation in stroke trials. Using the data gained through the focus groups, Grewal will tailor an intervention to help encourage recruitment. At the end of the two-year award period, Grewal will seek additional funding for a pilot trial of her intervention.
Grewal credits her success in part to her participation in the Clinical Trialist Training Program (CTTP) offered by the South Carolina Clinical & Translational Research Institute (SCTR). The program, which protects 10% of early-career physicians’ time so that they can engage in clinical research, introduces early-career physicians to the clinical research infrastructure at MUSC, familiarizes them with SCTR resources and consultations and assists them in applying to become a site PI for government- and industry-funded multicenter trials. With SCTR’s support, Grewal is now site PI for several industry-funded and National Institutes of Health-funded multicenter trials as well as leads investigator-initiated research in stroke recovery. She believes that the Winn Career Development Award will build on this solid institutional knowledge and allow her to take advantage of continued SCTR support, while gaining new expertise on how to adapt trials to meet the needs of patients.
“I think the Winn Career Development Award will allow me to take what I learned from CTTP a step further – teaching me community engagement techniques that can be rolled out throughout the SC-CoAST sites and incorporated into all future trials that I will design and run,” she said.
