NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Weill Cornell Medical College said this week that it has received a $49.6 million grant from the National Institutes of Health that renews funding for its Clinical and Translational Science Center, which conducts a wide range of research and includes a molecular sciences lab, for a second five-year period.
The award, from the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, will fund the CTSC, a New York City-based multi-institute consortium headed by Weill Cornell's Graduate School of Medical Sciences that was launched five years ago under NIH's first round of Clinical and Translational Sciences grants.
The aim of the center, like that of the Clinical and Translational Science Awards program, is to accelerate the clinical uptake of biomedical research discoveries by engaging in multidisciplinary studies that link basic science and clinical resources.
Julianne Imperato-McGinley, the CTSC's principal investigator and program director at Weill Cornell, said in a statement that the center provides a broad array of services, ranging from support for researchers with biostatistics and biomedical informatics, to patient resources and community engagement, to funding for promising new research areas.
"This renewal grant represents an important acknowledgement of the progress we've made in strengthening collaborative relationships between leading research institutions in New York City, nurturing the next generation of translational researchers and building an infrastructure to support further medical innovation."
The CTSC includes several core labs, including a molecular core, a general core, a multiplex analysis lab, and other specialized cores. The molecular core provides training and access to a range of services, including RNA and DNA extraction, genotyping, DNA sequencing, oligonucleotide synthesis, quantitative PCR and RT-PCR, and gene expression profiling.
The CTSC network includes researchers at Weill Cornell; New York Presbyterian Hospital; Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center; the Hospital for Special Surgery; Cornell University; Hunter College of the City University of New York's Center for the Study of Gene Structure and Function, and Schools of Public Health and Nursing, and the Animal Medical Center.