NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – The National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences expects to commit around $110 million in 2013 to fund as many as 18 Institutional Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA), a program it has taken over from the National Center for Research Resources, which was phased out at the end of last year, according to a new funding announcement.
The CTSA program, which launched in 2005, is aimed at supporting infrastructure and training at integrated academic sites that will increase the quality, safety, efficiency, validity, and speed of clinical and translational science.
Before the CTSA program was moved into the new NCATS center, the National Institutes of Health started a working group to recommend a strategy for how the program could be best used to support translational science.
As GenomeWeb Daily News reported in March, that group recommended that the CTSA program continue to provide infrastructure to support the full spectrum of translational research and take steps to build on existing strengths in the program and to ensure its further development to support the new NCATS program.
In the funding announcement, NCATS said that the new grants incorporate many suggestions that were developed by the working group and taken from responses to a public request for information and from investigators. The center also plans to use a report from the Institute of Medicine that is due out next year to make further decisions about how to shape the CTSA awards.