This is a proposal to establish a General Clinical Research Center (GCRC) at the Bowman Gray School of Medicine (BGSM)/North Carolina Baptist Hospital (NCBH) Medical Center. The GCRC is designed to: 1) promote, support, and enhance excellence in biomedical research through the conduct of efficient and productive clinical investigations; 2) provide a nucleus upon which research programs and educational activities can be developed and strengthened; 3) further facilitate interactions between physician scientists and basic scientists; 4) provide a focus which stimulates junior faculty, as well as students, house staff, and fellows-in-training, to include creative clinical research in their career objectives; and 5) serve as an educational resource for training in clinical research. The GCRC physical facility is strategically located and will consist of inpatient beds, outpatient examining rooms, procedure room, core laboratory, metabolic kitchen, nurses' station, conference room, computer room, and offices for program director, associate director, administrator, and head nurse. The center is easily accessed by outpatients, and it is in close proximity to other hospital units. The GCRC will be jointly operated by the BGSM and the NCBH based on mutual commitments and responsibilities; it will be available to all disciplines in the medical center. The initial clinical investigations involve the Departments of Internal Medicine, Neurology, Surgery, Pediatrics, Anesthesiology, Public Health Sciences, Biochemistry, and Microbiology and Immunology. The research also involves interdisciplinary programmatic efforts within the institution: The Comprehensive Cancer Center of Wake Forest University, the Atherosclerosis SCOR Program, the Stroke Center, the Program in Molecular Genetics, the Program on the Biology of Inflammation, and the J. Paul Sticht Center on Aging. Research themes include: endocrine-metabolism, cardiology, oncology, pulmonary and critical care medicine, infectious diseases, gastroenterology, musculoskeletal disease, vascular surgery, and epidemiology. Collaborations exist between clinical sciences and the basic sciences of microbiology and immunology, biochemistry, and molecular genetics. At its 50th anniversary, the institution is poised to establish a GCRC based on: 1) increases in the quantity and quality of clinical research at the institution; 2) growth of the BGSM/NCBH Medical Center as a biomedical research and patient care center; 3) close interactions among departmental and programmatic research efforts; and 4) increases in the number of collaborative programs between basic science and clinical faculty. Establishment of a GCRC is critical to fostering further academic maturation at this medical center, and initiating this GCRC in the 1990s will allow the development, de novo, of a model of basic clinical-population-based collaborative research appropriate to the emerging biomedical sciences of the 21st century.
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