The Administrative Core will continue to promote interactions with other CMCRs and members of the Consortium, with NIAID Program leaders, and with industry, working to further the CMCR goals. At the local level, we will continue to use our Internal and the External Scientific Review Groups (ISAG/ESAG) to develop new avenues of research and to build a strong an infrastructure at UCLA to continue to discover and develop novel mitigators. We have made several important changes to the Administrative Core for this renewal. We have appointed 2 new leaders, although Dr. McBride will continue to have overall responsibility. Dr. Chute joins us from Duke where he was Co-PI of the Duke CMCR. Dr. Weidhass joins us from Yale. She brings clinical and business acumen that will help greatly with product development. We have refined our Cores to focus of product development and testing, which formerly were the sole purview of Projects. This has been an ongoing natural transition as we advanced drug discovery from high throughput screening to data handling and analysis, chemical synthesis, optimization, pharmacokinetics, drug formulation, and toxicoinformatics. What was primarily a screening Core has evolved into a Product Development Core. Our Animal Core had developed radiation models that are highly reproducible and sensitive and no longer need Projects to perform mitigator testing. This is now the Product Testing Animal Core. These Cores will have added responsibilities and work directly with Projects through an Executive Committee formed of all PIs to prioritize mitigators for development through a reiterative process of optimization within our Cores. Optimized mitigators will be fed into Projects for contextual testing, while mitigators from Projects will be fed into the Cores for optimization; thus assuring a very high level of integration. Our 4 projects are integrated around obtaining a deeper understanding of the interactions between tissue damage, innate immune responses, and stem cell recovery after radiation exposure and to exploit these to improve mitigation of ARS and DEARE. Dr. Sayre will continue to provide statistical input. The Administrative Core will oversee these processes and be responsible for their success. The UCLA-CMCR now has over 100 members. Its regular meetings and symposia organized by this Core are well attended. We also organized national CMCR workshops in Baltimore in 2013 and 2014 with help from other CMCRs with over 100 attendees. The first was very successful and we anticipate the same to be true this year. Finally, the Core will be responsible for administrative, fiscal, and executive decisions, as well as scientific productivity and contributions by the UCLA-CMCR and their dissemination to the CMCRC as a whole.
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