The universities, hospitals, government agencies and community organizations in Rhode Island are well positioned to bridge the gaps between the worlds of clinical and basic science. Rhode Island's small size, population demographics, and organizational structure are assets and present opportunities to implement and test transformative clinical and translational research. The health care delivery environment within the state is highly conducive to clinical research due to the relatively limited number of health care systems. Further contributing to Rhode Island's translational research infrastructure are a number of well-organized Institutional Developmental Award (IDeA) Programs, each with core facility, faculty development and collaborative research resources. But despite Rhode Island's impressive educational institutions, streamlined clinical environment, and successful IDeA sponsored research and mentoring programs, the majority of these resources have not been coordinately focused towards developing a multi-institutional, clinical and translational research infrastructure that would serve to improve the effectiveness of clinical practice and health care policy in Rhode Island. The objective of the Rhode Island Center for Clinical Translational Science (RI-CCTS) is to bridge these infrastructure gaps by creating an overarching, multidisciplinary, central organization to better coordinate and leverage existing resources for program management and thereby provide the infrastructure necessary to address current and future health concerns in Rhode Island. The goals of the RI-CCTS are to: 1. Educate, mentor and encourage young investigators in clinical research professional development. 2. Eliminate the obstacles that may prevent researchers from pursuing clinical research initiatives that can lead to funded research programs. 3. Bring together the diverse clinical research resources to provide a virtual home that facilitates new collaborations and enhanced efficiencies. 4. Facilitate research to gather preliminary data necessary for developing competitive research proposals. 5. Provide contemporary infrastructure for clinical and translational research including research planning and implementation, advanced biostatistics and epidemiology support and biomedical informatics. 6. Foster coordination between translational researchers at our participating entities so as to create new productive collaborations with translational outcomes. 7. Sustain a clinical translational research environment by providing the necessary management and coordination of resources. 8. Create an innovative Tracking and Evaluation program that will combine support requests with use and cost data and apply lessons learned in the CTSA program to the CTR environment.
The Universities, Hospitals and Community Organizations in Rhode Island are well positioned to bridge the gaps between the worlds of clinical and basic science. Using the targeted resources of an IDeA-CTR Award, the Brown Institute for Translational Sciences, and a statewide consortium of collaborators, hospitals, universities, non-profit organizations and government agencies, will draw on the resources already developed in the NIH Institutional Development Award (IDeA) programs (core labs and faculty development programs) to enhance the Rhode Island Center for Clinical Translational Science's (RI-CCTS) ability to support clinical and translational research. We will serve as a bench-to-bedside research network and career development umbrella for the investigator community in affiliated institutions. In so doing, we will enhance patient-centered research and accelerate discoveries and health innovations to benefit our communities and to serve our State.
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