In a major new effort to translate medical research into practical and accessible treatment, Weill Cornell Medical College (WCMC) will lead a new Clinical and Translational Science Center, creating a network for biomedical collaboration on Manhattan's Upper East Side. The center will be funded through a $49 million Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the largest federal grant ever awarded to WCMC.

The center will comprise a diverse group of collaborating institutions, including Cornell's College of Human Ecology, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Hospital for Special Surgery and Hunter College. In addition, Cornell University Cooperative Extension-New York City (CUCE-NYC) will lead extensive outreach efforts in the city.

"There is a pressing need for broad-based multidisciplinary collaborations that can fulfill the incredible promise of recent research advances in areas like genetics and bioinformatics, and efficiently translate them into real-world interventions that benefit the community," said Cornell President David Skorton, who is a professor of internal medicine and pediatrics at WCMC. "As it strives to meet this challenge, the new Clinical and Translational Science Center will also be an integral component of Cornell's commitment to interdisciplinary and inter-institutional collaboration."

The program will play a major role in educating the next generation of researchers about the complexities of translating research discoveries into clinical trials and ultimately into practice, said Antonio M. Gotto Jr., the Stephen and Suzanne Weiss Dean of WCMC. "We are honored to be selected as the lead institution for this new biomedical complex," he said.

Alan Mathios, interim dean of the human ecology college and professor of policy analysis and management, noted: "The NIH selection of Cornell for this center recognizes the university's excellence in both science and service, and furthers the integration of Cornell's research and outreach missions. At the College of Human Ecology, we're very proud to have a role in facilitating important research that will have a real impact in people's lives, and excited about another collaboration that brings together Cornell's expertise across disciplines."

Innovations that result from the new center will be made widely available through national CTSA steering committees, said Julianne Imperato-McGinley, the center's principal investigator and program director. "Together with our collaborator institutions, we will work toward moving translational research from bench to bedside to community. Furthermore, in a process of circular innovation, lessons learned in the community will then be the basis for new research efforts."

Imperato-McGinley, who is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Distinguished Professor of Medicine in Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism, will also be named the associate dean for educational training and translational research at WCMC.

William Trochim, director of the Cornell Office for Research on Evaluation and professor of policy analysis and management in the human ecology college, will lead the evaluation of projects for the center.

Cooperative Extension will work with community groups across New York City in such areas as facilitating clinical trials, working with physician groups to design small research projects around health issues, and increasing the availability and amount of health-related information to city residents, said Don Tobias, CUCE-NYC executive director.

"Nothing of this kind of scale, this penetration level has been done before," Tobias added. "This is indicative of what a lot of us have been talking about in terms of increasing the level of collaboration between the Ithaca campus and the New York City campus, and it's also indicative of what we've been very interested in accomplishing in terms of the land-grant mission and how it intersects with the medical school's role in the city."

Neighboring institutions will contribute significantly to the initiative, which will target the full range of clinical areas, including cancer, diabetes, AIDS, cardiovascular disease, women's health, reproductive medicine, geriatrics, psychiatry, Alzheimer's disease, kidney disease, obesity, multiple sclerosis, neuromuscular disorders, trauma and burns.

The award 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.