VCU’s Wright Center awards four NIH-funded grants to accelerate medical research
Professors from the schools of Medicine, Public Health and Social Work earn support for disease-agnostic projects that have the potential to be applied across different fields of medicine to help patients.
Four interdisciplinary research projects earned a total of $100,000 in translational science grants from the C. Kenneth and Dianne Wright Center for Clinical and Translational Research at Virginia Commonwealth University.
These $25,000 pilot awards are funded through the Wright Center’s $27 million Clinical and Translational Science Award from the National Institutes of Health, supporting the center’s mission to identify and solve systemic hurdles in medical research.
Unlike traditional medical research, which focuses on specific diseases, these translational science grants fund the development of new methods, technologies, and research practices that are “disease agnostic.” The goal is to create generalizable solutions that can be applied across many different fields of medicine to make the journey from laboratory discovery to patient care faster and more efficient.
“The purpose of these awards is to improve the translational process,” said F. Gerard Moeller, M.D., director of the Wright Center. “By identifying and overcoming the scientific and operational hurdles — or bottlenecks — that slow down research, we aren’t just supporting four studies; we are developing a more effective framework for all future medical research at VCU and beyond.”
The 2006 awardees and their projects include:
Erin Britton, Ph.D., School of Public Health
“Building a Virginia APCD Training Platform for a Data-Proficient Research Workforce”
Erin L. Britton, Ph.D., an assistant professor in VCU’s School of Public Health, is targeting the technical bottleneck that prevents researchers from effectively using the Virginia All-Payer Claims Database. Designed to support healthcare research and decision-making, the database is a powerful health data resource enabling researchers, policymakers and other stakeholders to better understand healthcare utilization, costs and outcomes across Virginia. However, this data is complex and protected for patient privacy, making it difficult for researchers to use. This creates a major bottleneck, where too few people with the right skills can use it to answer critical health questions.
Britton’s project aims to create a “high-fidelity synthetic dataset” — a safe practice environment that mimics real healthcare data without compromising patient privacy — to train a new generation of data-proficient researchers.
“To accelerate translational research and support evidence-based healthcare policy around things like tobacco use and insurance coverage for doula care, we need to combine rigorous study designs with real-world data; and building that expertise requires practice,” Britton said. “My pilot addresses the growing demand for research using real-world data that was not collected for research by building a hands-on learning opportunity. The Wright Center’s support is an investment in expanding research capacity at our university and will help me efficiently train data-proficient collaborators to advance research on reducing care fragmentation.”
For more information about the Wright Center’s pilot grant programs and other funding opportunities, visit cctr.vcu.edu.
Written by Christopher Richmond; excerpted from a longer VCU News article.
Categories Department News, Faculty news