To address the health issues of the mostly rural northern New England population and build translational research capacity, there is a compelling need to integrate the clinical and translational research infrastructure into a network that brings together the diversity of resources and expertise of Maine Medical Center and the University of Vermont in the Northern New England Clinical and Translational Research Network (NNE-CTR). The goal of the Translational Research Technologies Core (TRTC) of the NNE-CTR is to provide coordinated access to state-of-the-art core facilities developed at the institutions through a combination of COBRE, INBRE, institutional and other forms of support over the last several years. The TRTC will provide access to instrumentation, expertise and other resources crucial to the success of clinical and translational research by NNE-CTR investigators. These resources include infrastructure and technical expertise for genomic, epigenetic, proteomic, cell and tissue analyses and clinical and translational genomics. In addition to providing infrastructure, instrumentation and expertise, the TRTC will provide education and training to investigators about current and emerging technologies that will be essential to the success of their research activities. The TRTC will coordinate all of these activities through a web-based portal that will serve to integrate all of these resources, thus creating a single point of entry for accessing core resources at NNE-CTR partner institutions. To accomplish these goals we propose three specific aims.
In Aim 1 we will establish the infrastructure necessary to coordinate access to NNE-CTR core facilities. A robust, highly functional web-portal will be an enabling step towards this goal.
In Aim 2, the TRTC will develop, in collaboration with the Professional Development and Pilot Projects Program Cores, outreach and education programs to enhance awareness, understanding and use of advanced biomedical technologies.
In Aim 3, the TRTC will work with the Tracking and Evaluation and Administrative Cores to develop evaluation tools to measure the use of core facilities and their effectiveness in advancing clinical and translational research in NNE-CTR as well as to determine the future infrastructure needs of NNE-CTR investigators. By increasing the capacity for clinical and translational investigations through enhanced access to biomedical technologies, new discoveries will be made that will directly benefit not only the health care needs of the rural northern New England population, but that of the nation.
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