The University of Tennessee, Memphis, General Clinical Research Center (GCRC), which is in its 28th year of operation, requests support for an additional 4 year grant cycle from 1/1/94-12/31/97. In the last few years, our GCRC has suffered from a declining census and the resignation of its former successful Director which has caused an institutional review and reorientation of the GCRC. An institutional decision has been made to make the services of the GCRC more widely available to clinical investigators throughout the University. A new Director with extensive experience in clinical investigation and research administration, William B. Applegate, MD, MPH, has been appointed with the mandate to restructure and reorient the mission and services of the UT Memphis GCRC. The GCRC adult inpatient/outpatient unit at the UT Bowld Hospital and the pediatric inpatient/outpatient unit at LeBonheur remain. The former has 4 designated inpatient beds and 10 outpatient exam rooms while the latter has 1 inpatient bed and 4 outpatient rooms. Since the appointment of new leadership, outpatient utilization is up 46%. Instead of focusing primarily on endocrine metabolic research, the GCRC now will blend continued strong metabolic research with increased research in pediatrics, maternal-fetal medicine, and gerontology. A major emphasis has been placed on coupling funded basic and applied (epidemiology, clinical trials) investigators so advantage can be taken of large cohorts representative of the overall Memphis population to answer both applied and more basic questions. A more structured approach to research training of medical students, housestaff, fellows, and junior faculty will focus around the GCRC. Trainees will not only be involved in ongoing clinical research, but also provided with short focused seminars in the general areas of biostatistics and epidemiology, research design, metabolic research techniques, and molecular medicine research. The leadership of the GCRC has been broadened so that the executive committee of the GCRC now includes representatives from Medicine, Pediatrics, and Obstetrics and Gynecology. In addition the expertise of the executive team spans investigation in clinical epidemiology, to metabolic research, to molecular medicine. In order to make the GCRC more of a University-wide """"""""utility"""""""" more emphasis will be placed on using scatter beds and mobile nurse technician teams so that good clinical research can be supported at any UT affiliated clinical site. A very user friendly, collaborative CDMAS has been devised which greatly expands collaborative multi-site research and provides databases that allow more precise monitoring and carry-out of protocols. Also a large variety of statistical packages and other software programs are available.
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