NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – The Stanford Center for Clinical and Translational Research and Education, or Spectrum, is being awarded $45.3 million over four and a half years by the National Institutes of Health to push forward translational research in medicine.
Spectrum is one of 15 institutions to receive such an award being funded as part of the Clinical and Translational Sciences Awards, which were launched in 2006 by NIH "to help meet the nation's urgent need to provide better healthcare to more people for less money," the Stanford School of Medicine said.
Stanford won a first round of CTSA funding in 2008 of $30 million.
The new funding will be used to support two new programs at Stanford, one in disease diagnostics and one in population health sciences.
The diagnostics program seeks to develop new methods of testing and preventing disease through advances in omics, immune monitoring, molecular imaging, single-cell analysis, computation, and informatics, the school said. Atul Butte, chief of systems medicine and associate professor of pediatrics and genetics, will lead the program.
The Population Health Sciences Initiative will design systems to serve as a new source of practice-based evidence. The systems will be based on the daily experiences of practicing physicians and information drawn from clinical data warehouses, Stanford said.
This initiative is led by Robert Harrington, professor and chair of medicine; Mark Cullen, professor of medicine and chief of the Division of General Medical Disciplines; and Douglas Owens, professor of medicine and director of the Stanford Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research and the Center for Health Policy.
The new CTSA award also will be used to address the shortage of qualified clinical and translational researchers across the US by funding new training programs and online courses in clinical research, Stanford said.