Established in 2009, the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) was renewed for a second five-year term in 2015 with a $34 million grant. The CTSA Program of the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) mission is to accelerate discoveries, development, and delivery of new treatments to improve health outcomes across the lifespan.
The award supports the ISMMS Institutes for Translational Sciences’ strategic plan to develop an infrastructure to support research and educate the next generation of investigators. ISMMS is one of approximately 60 CTSA-funded hubs across the country. CTSA hubs are expected to streamline the research process to get studies up and running faster; to enhance collaborations with other hubs, community providers, patients, and industry; and to promote team science and develop effective methods for recruitment and retention of clinical research participants. ConduITS accomplishes this by:
- Providing consultation, oversight, and facilities for clinical and translational research.
- Developing new methodologies to improve trial design and reduce participant burden.
- Innovate processes to increase the quality and efficiency of translational research.
- Develop informatics tools and solutions to accelerate the full translational continuum.
- Develop innovative educational programs training the workforce needed to respond to the challenges of translational science.
- Engaging the community and its affiliates to translate health benefits to the public.
Strategic Goals
ConduITS will advance human health by transforming this hub into a translational research laboratory, partnering with our diverse patient population, other stakeholders, institutional clinicians and scientists, and investigators at other CTSA Network Hubs to ensure high quality research, research education, and development of unique, innovative resources to catalyze translation of biomedical discoveries across the lifespan.
We will accomplish this by achieving the following Specific Aims:
Aim 1: Ensure that researchers have the skills and knowledge needed to advance highest research innovation, quality, and safety by developing innovative curricula for research training of students, investigators and research staff at all levels in order to implement rigorous ethical research methodologies, advance innovative technologies, and collaborate with other CTSA hubs to advance training goals.
Aim 2: Expand programs to further promote workforce diversity through recruitment, education, mentoring and retention of the most talented students, faculty and researchers, emphasizing underrepresented racial and ethnic groups, and individuals with disabilities or from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Aim 3: Foster a transdisciplinary learning culture conducive to innovation through incentives to work across and beyond traditional disciplines, facilitate the formation of translational teams and promote collaborations, educating investigators on core competencies and team strategies for transdisciplinary science, and evaluation and dissemination of new research tools and methods promoting transdisciplinary research.
Aim 4: Coordinate the health care delivery and translational research enterprise by enhancing our informatics capacity and integrating secure electronic health records (EHRs), clinical trials management systems, and institutional biobanks and data repositories to better engage patients and clinicians in clinical trials and community engaged research.
Aim 5: Engage diverse stakeholders at the local and national level in all phases of translational research, including patients, caregivers, clinicians, healthcare delivery representatives, advocacy groups, CTSA Hubs, biotech and pharmaceutical companies and venture capital firms through our innovative accelerator models.
Aim 6: Incorporate translational research across the lifespan, with particular focus on perinatal and pediatric research, geriatric populations, and populations impacted by health disparities.
Aim 7: Continue to innovate and streamline research administrative oversight and processes to minimize roadblocks, identify and rectify gaps, ensure quality and assurance, monitor outcomes and garner feedback from stakeholders to facilitate and enhance participation in clinical trials supported by ConduITS, regional CTSA hubs, and the CTSA national network.
Impact: Addressing these aims will augment ConduITS’ role in transforming the national translational research enterprise to improve human health by developing and sharing innovative educational programs, participating in multi-site trials including centralized regulatory oversight, subcontracting and data-sharing, incentivizing transdisciplinary team science and a diversified workforce, and developing new tools to integrate and securely “mine” diverse datasets throughout the MSHS and interested hubs in the CTSA Network.