The CCTS Investigator            
Accelerating Discoveries Toward Better Health
July 2018    
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded a $25 million Clinical and Translational Science Award to  Dr. Rebecca Jackson , a member of the faculty of The Ohio State University College of Medicine and director of the university’s Center for Clinical and Translational Science (CCTS). This funding from the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences will further the center’s mission of translating scientific discoveries into clinical therapies to improve human health.

The CCTS is a collaboration of The Ohio State University College of Medicine, other colleges at Ohio State and Nationwide Children’s Hospital. This is the center’s third five-year cycle of funding from the NIH since 2008.

“We’re thrilled with this award because it allows us to continue to contribute to the national conversation on translational research. The goal of studies supported by this award will be to bring transformational care to our patients. This care will begin with our patients right here in the Columbus community,” Jackson said. “I’m grateful for the large and passionate team of researchers that assisted with our grant application.”

The CCTS Open House will be held on Wednesday, Aug. 29 from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. on the 2nd floor of the Prior Health Sciences Library (260 Prior Hall, 376 West 10th Avenue) at The Ohio State University. 

All are welcome to attend to learn more about research support available for behavioral outcomes, biostatistics, clinical research, community engagement, genomics, recruitment and retention, regulatory and ethics, research evaluation, research informatics, veterinary clinical studies, and more. 

In addition, the CCTS will be giving away an Apple Watch Series 3 to one lucky attendee.

The Center for Clinical & Translational Science (CCTS) is now accepting applications for a NIH funded program developed for faculty biomedical researchers.

The Business of Science program provides biomedical researchers the tools to develop into independent researchers who can clearly translate and report findings to grant sponsors, and the ability to efficiently manage the process to turn their observations in the laboratory, clinic, and community into impactful interventions.

No more than 35 researchers can attend this training.

The program aims to recruit faculty early in their career, but also welcomes faculty from all ranks. We encourage all participants to continue building our research community.

The sessions are practically oriented, interactive and introduce participants to methods they can implement immediately in their research projects. Program attendees will:
  • Learn to manage human and process dimensions to advance projects to conclusion, all within an environment of uncertainty.
  • Learn to effectively use information, data and decision tools to leverage the best thinking to arrive at the best path to success.
  • Understand the role of creativity, intuition and person-centered development in the successful application of discovery to the development of new therapies.
  • Consider why anyone would choose to follow you, learn how the best leaders inspire others to follow them and be inspired to define your leadership legacy.

Applicants are encouraged to apply here or learn more about the program here .
CCTS KL2 scholars will be presenting at the OSU Steam Factory on Franklinton Friday’s in Sept. and Oct.

The STEAM Factory is a diverse and inclusive grass-roots network in the Ohio State community that facilitates creative and interdisciplinary collaboration, innovation and dissemination. Franklinton Fridays are a neighborhood wide art, music, food and gallery hop that occur the second Friday of every month. The STEAM Factory, hosts a diverse array of faculty and post-doctoral presenters over a huge variety of research and outreach topics for Franklinton Friday attendees.

K scholars Lawrence Shirley and David Bradley will present, short, accessible presentations on their research on Friday evening, Sep. 14 th . 

Isabel Menendez, Ross Larue, Thomas Mace will introduce audiences to their research on Friday evening Oct. 12.
This handsome boy name is Gus, and he is part of a clinical trial for dogs with lymphoma. The belly rub is not part of the clinical trial procedures, but we could not resist, and we love to see that big smile! 

This clinical trial’s purpose is to provide a foundation for the understanding of cellular senescence across species, as well as identify possible therapeutic targets for reducing side effects and improving outcome in dogs and humans with cancer undergoing chemotherapy.

The Ohio State College of Medicine's Center for Faculty Advancement, Mentoring and Engagement (FAME) is hosting a workshop titled "Setting Up a Successful Research Program". Participants will learn that there is not "one right way" to set up a successful research program as panelists share strategies and tips from their experiences of what works at OSU.

The workshop will be held Aug. 8, 2018 at 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm in Room 165 of the Davis Heart and Lung Research Institute.

The Office of Responsible Research Practices and the CCTS are offering a workshop on the Buck-IRB initial submission application. The presentation will:

  • Provide an overview of the Buck-IRB system and how to navigate through the Ohio State IRB initial application (not external or exempt)
  • Identify documents that typically accompany a complete application
  • Discuss common pitfalls and tips for successful submission
  • Focus on application sections specific to medical research

While the session will be tailored to medical researchers, anyone preparing IRB submissions is welcome. The session will be held on Thurs., Aug. 2 from 11:00am to 12:30pm in the Biomedical Research Tower, Room 115, 460 West Twelfth Avenue. The session is also available for live stream attendance.

Register now or contact Sandra Meadows with questions.
The Office of Responsible Research Practices (ORRP) and the Center for Clinical and Translational Science are offering a presentation on the secondary analysis of data and biospecimens. This session will:

  • Review regulatory requirements
  • Discuss IRB review considerations
  • Explore scenarios involving secondary data and biospecimen analysis.

While the session will be tailored to medical researchers, anyone preparing IRB submissions is welcome. The workshop will be held on Tues., Aug. 21 st , from 8am to 9:30am in Room 115, Biomedical Research Tower, 460 West Twelfth Avenue. The session is also available for live stream attendance.

Register now or contact Sandra Meadows with questions.
Nationwide Children’s Hospital has become home to the most innovative clinical trials in the nation, and oftentimes, globally. In an effort to create an intellectual community to foster compliance and lower institutional risk, NCH is offering an expanded clinical research course series on a variety of topics. Individuals completing all sessions will receive a certificate of Clinical Research Competency.

Courses will be held in the main Clinical Research Conference Room located on the 6 th  floor of the Tower building (T 6220) unless otherwise noted, and are eligible for CE credits with ACRP or SoCRA.

For more information on 2018 courses, dates offered, and registration, please visit  the ANCHOR website (this is a NCH Internal Site) for the Clinical Research Competency Series.
ResearchMatch brings together people who are trying to find research studies and clinical trials, and researchers who are looking for volunteers. 

ResearchMatch is a national volunteer registry that researchers at OSU may use to find potential volunteers at no cost. The aim of ResearchMatch is to serve as an effective, useful and complementary recruitment tool that will help connect willing volunteers with researchers who are searching for appropriate volunteers to be placed in their research studies.  

Ohio leads the nation in registered volunteers. The Recruitment + Retention office at the CCTS provides assistance obtaining IRB approval to use ResearchMatch.org for recruitment and best practice tips. 

Team Science has been identified as a critical element of the CTSA Program. The Great CTSA Team Science Contest is an opportunity to share your team science experiences (successful or not) with your CTSA colleagues. The contest is open to anyone associated with your CTSA (investigators, community members, staff, etc.).

The purpose of this contest is to find the best ideas in all of CTSA-land for encouraging better team science. Any person associated with a CTSA hub is eligible. It can be the hub PI, program director, staff member, trainee, student, a participating researcher, a community member et al. Stories may be submitted from now until Sept. 10. Winners will be highlighted at the national CTSA Program meeting in October.

Save the date for the seventh annual Appalachian Translational Research Network Summit on Sept. 20 and 21, 2018 at the University of Kentucky.

Last year's ATRN Summit, held at Pennsylvania State University, focused on identifying new areas of research and collaboration to help with addressing the significant health challenges and disparities to Appalachia. ATRN institution members had an opportunity to share best practices in the area of community engagement and new and exciting research projects in Appalachia.

If you are interested in becoming an individual member of the ATRN or would like to receive updates and registration information for next year's summit, please contact Jeff Grever.
The Appalachian Translational Research Network is accepting submissions for its summit on Sept. 20 and 21.

Abstracts may be submitted on any aspect of health-related research or evidence-based practice that is focused on Appalachian communities served by our ATRN member institutions. This can include: basic laboratory research; clinical research; community-based research; epidemiological and/or populations studies; outcomes research; health services research; evidence supporting best practices in community organizations or clinical settings. Abstracts may describe work that has been or will be submitted at other meetings. The majority of abstract submissions will be accepted for presentation during the poster session on Thursday, Sept. 20 from 5-7 p.m. A limited number of abstracts will be chosen for oral presentation during the 1st   and 2nd sessions on Friday, Sept. 21. Applicants will be notified of their presentation format by Friday, August 17, 2018

The deadline to submit is Thursday, Aug. 2, 2018.

Save the date for  NCATS Day 2018: Engaging Patients and Communities for Smarter Science  on Sept. 28, 2018, at the National Institutes of Health main campus in Bethesda, Maryland.

The purpose of the event, which will be held from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., is to provide a forum to share and reflect upon patient and community needs — as well as best practices in addressing those needs — so that NCATS can best shape its research priorities, programs and initiatives.

Participants will share and discuss ways to overcome translational research challenges  and leverage opportunities through effective patient and community engagement. They also will learn strategies to broaden participation in research and to incorporate diverse patient and community input into their work.

NIH Matchmaker can read your mind–or at least your abstract. Paste in up to 15,000 characters, and it’ll analyze your text for key terms and spit out the 100 most closely related projects. Here’s a quick tutorial for using it:
Gene-based therapy is a promising and cutting-edge approach for the treatment of rare diseases. While these tailored therapies offer hope for patients, there are still many unanswered questions.

To help facilitate discussion among academic, government and industry researchers,  NCATS   and the Food and Drug Administration’s   Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research   will co-host “ The Growing Promise of Gene Therapy Approaches to Rare Diseases ” workshop on Aug. 20-21, 2018. The event will take place at the National Institutes of Health main campus in Bethesda, Maryland. The goals of this two-day workshop include:

  • Reviewing the state of current gene therapy approaches; 
  • Identifying challenges to and strategies for advancing gene therapy research; and
  • Discussing how to collaboratively scale and accelerate gene therapy development to benefit patients with rare diseases that currently lack effective treatments.

Do you dream of opening your own practice? Have an idea for a revolutionary health-related product or service? Turn your ideas into reality at our Healthcare Innovation and Entrepreneurship Workshop, September 13-14 at The Longaberger Alumni House.
 
Our experts will teach you how to:
  • Develop a business plan
  • Create a new, innovative role within an existing organization
  • Lead innovation and entrepreneurship principles in your healthcare organization
  • Successfully manage family and work expenses as an entrepreneur
  • Determine if your business will be profitable
  • Pitch your ideas

In addition, attendees have an opportunity to showcase thier work on improving the health and well-being of the world through health care innovation at the workshop. If you're an excited individual interested in sharing your innovation by presenting a poster and/or product during the reception, please contact Liz McClurg .

The OSU Office of Research provides a campus-wide subscription to an excellent newsletter on Research Grantwriting News. Writers are experts in research/proposal development and this resource should be required reading for anyone preparing a grant proposal. Recommendations are especially helpful to those who are new to grant writing or want to enhance their grantsmanship skills.

If you are thinking about your next research project, we encourage you to schedule a research funding consult and learn how to use SPIN, an extensive research funding opportunity database. SPIN contains over 40,000 opportunities from more than 10,000 sponsors. With SPIN, you will learn how to:
 
  • Create and save customized searches that generate daily email funding alerts
  • Organize and share funding announcements with colleagues
  • Access an extensive Keyword list, allowing for greater flexibility in your searches
  • Quickly locate Federal or non-Federal programs
  • Locate all types of funding information, e.g., travel grants, fellowships, and other sponsored programs
 
All Ohio State faculty, staff, and students are able to create an account in SPIN. Please visit  http://go.osu.edu/funding  for step-by-step instructions.
For years researchers have used the  Matchmaker   feature in  NIH RePORTER  to identify NIH-funded projects similar to their supplied abstracts, research bios, or other scientific text. Matchmaker was recently enhanced to make it just as easy to identify NIH program officials whose portfolios include projects in your research area.

After entering your scientific text (up to 15,000 characters), Matchmaker will analyze the key terms and concepts to identify up to 500 similar projects. Those projects will continue to show on the Projects tab with handy charts to visualize the results and quickly filter identified projects by Institute/Center, Activity Code, and Study Section. A new Program Official tab identifies the program officials associated with the matched projects and includes its own filters for Institute/Center and Activity Code. From the list of program officials you are one click away from their contact information and matched projects in their portfolios. Never before has it been so easy to answer the question “Who at NIH can I talk to about my research?”

The Department of Health and Human Services announced an  Interim Final Rule That Delays Both the Effective Date and General Compliance Date of the Revisions to the Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects  (the Common Rule) for a minimum of six months with future delay possible.

The Regulatory Guidance for Academic Research of Drugs and Devices (ReGARDD) Program offers an innovative and organized platform in which regulatory expertise can be shared across academic intuitions. ReGARDD provides academic researchers with the regulatory tools and resources necessary to successfully navigate the pathway from discovery to clinical implementation of new drugs, biologics and medical devices. We use a two-pronged approach:
 
  • A shared CTSA website that is comprised of helpful tools, templates, decision trees, and educational resources to support academic investigators’ regulatory needs,
  • A regional forum of regulatory experts from the four institutions involved in the program. The role of the forum is to strengthen the regulatory affairs workforce at each institution by providing exposure to a broad array of regulatory knowledge and a platform to share best practices, and discuss complex regulatory issues.

The ReGARDD program is a collaboration between the regulatory affairs specialists from North Carolina Institutions that receive funding from the NIH Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) Program. These CTSA hub institutions are the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and partner RTI International, Duke University, and the Wake Forest School of Medicine.
 
The NIH announces this year’s Lasker Clinical Research Scholars Program. This is a competitive opportunity for early-stage physician-scientists to conduct independent clinical and translational research as tenure-track investigators at the NIH and in academia. It was established in 2011 to create career research opportunities for physician-scientists (it also includes dental and nurse scientists) and is targeted to outstanding post-fellowship physicians and other clinicians with strong research interests and credentials.

Funding provides full research and salary support for 5+ years at the NIH followed by three years in academia (up to $500,000/year) or continued appointment in the NIH intramural program. This program also allows for the opportunity for academic institutional affiliation while at the NIH. The deadline for applications is  August 31, 2018 . The general start date for the positions is summer 2019, but this is flexible. More information can be found at our website or by email to Dr. Chuck Dearolf .
The National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS)  at the National Institutes of Health invites small businesses to apply for funding through the  Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR)  2018 Omnibus Grant Solicitations:

 
NCATS encourages applications that address a range of focus areas relevant to any stage of translation, from target validation through pre-clinical and clinical evaluation, to intervention implementation and dissemination, including:

  • Drug Discovery and Development 
  • Biomedical, Clinical and Health Research Informatics 
  • Clinical, Dissemination and Implementation Research 
 
The next deadline to apply is Sept. 5, 2018, 5:00 p.m. local time.

The Infectious Diseases Institute (IDI) is committed to advancing infectious diseases and microbiology research. IDI seed grants are intended to foster interdisciplinary collaborative efforts and to enhance competitiveness for defined extramural support.

Funding provided by IDI should be thought of as a “venture capital initiative,” invested for the purposes of growth and return on investment (ROI). Therefore, it is important that requests provide sufficient rationale and evidence for the strong probability of success in near-future extramural funding applications and clearly articulate how funding will benefit the efforts of the IDI. 

The OSU CCTS is excited to announce that The OSU Office of Research’s CarmenWiki listing of all internal funding opportunities has been updated with a new column titled “ Includes Human Health ”. Thanks to Jeff Agnoli and his team, this resource will now help translational scientists to quickly find grants that are applicable to human health.

Funding Opportunities from the NIH.

Read about the latest translational science news, opportunities, and announcements in the latest edition of the NCATS e-Newsletter and the NIH's Weekly Funding Notice.



Learn more about PCORI through their blog, video room, news releases, and other resources.

Discover the latest news in translational science and grant opportunities from the Association for Clinical and Translational Science's monthly newsletter. 

When you sign up as a member of the OSU CCTS, you are entitled to become a member of The Association for Clinical and Translational Science at no cost .

As a member of the ACTS, you have access to a wide variety of benefits and tools to assist you with your research. These benefits include:

  • Discounted registration for the Translational Science Meeting
  • Email updates and web access to relevant translational science topics
  • Access to the ACTS newsletter, the ACTS Connection
  • Access to articles in the Journal of Clinical and Translational Science, published by Cambridge University Press
  • Opportunities for development and participation in committees and special interest groups