The Clinical and Translational Science Collaborative (CTSC) of Cleveland is a collaborative venture amongfive Cleveland health institutions - Case Western Reserve University, the Cleveland Clinic, UniversityHospitals, MetroHealth Medical Center, and the Veterans Administration Medical Center, as well ascommunity partners. CTSC achieved prior goals of uniting as a collaborative, developed informatics tools,resource sharing, and institutional commitments to enhance the collaborative. Consolidation and catalyticactivities begun in the last grant period will be continued. Moreover, CTSC will continue rigorous evaluationof both its operations and progress toward larger goals. CTSC has set three new goals for the next grantperiod. 1) Translation 1 research will be enhanced. Infrastructure in support of identification and structuraldetermination of therapeutic targets, as well as high through put screening will be implemented. Supportsystems to assist in patient based research both recruitment and testing will be streamlined andstrengthened. Critically, CTSC will create support systems to guide development of potential humantherapeutics and diagnostics from discovery to use in man, 2) CTSC will improve health parameters inCleveland, one of America's poorest and least healthy cities. Community Research Partnership Core isquerying the community via neighborhood focus groups to determine their health priorities. At least one ofthese priorities, and others selected based on the strengths of our CTSC investigative community, will betargeted for special effort. One practice based research network has already succeeded in reducing HgbAlcin 27,000 diabetics in Cleveland by one percentage point in three years, raising optimism that this projectcan indeed move the needle. 3) CTSC interactions with the national CTSA community will increase. Theinitial focus of CTSC was inward, establishing connections and catalyzing change in our home institutions,but in the next grant period the CTSC will increase interactions around the consortium. A primary focus willbe the Ohio Consortium ofthe three Ohio CTSAs (CTSC, Columbus, Cincinnati), which currently collaboratesurrounding child health and cancer projects, and on the web site NetWellness, which has been expandedfrom simply providing unbiased medical information to include descriptions of clinical research and access toclinical trials. In the next grant period goals will include extending the CTSC IRB electronic hub for facilitatedreview to include the other CTSA sites, increasing project collaboration, and connecting patient databasesvia Explorys, a web based informatics tool utilizing the electronic health record.
The CTSC is highly relevant to human health. Using the Cleveland biomedical community as a prototype,we will develop and test electronic and other strategies for coordinating research functions among differentinstitutions, such as IRB approval and facile data sharing. Using the Cleveland community as a laboratoryand our practice based research networks and community partnership resource as tools, we will seek toimprove health parameters in Cleveland. We will also develop more facile means for Translation 1.
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