Buffalo Clinical and Translational Research Center

Contact PD/PI: Murphy, Timothy F Buffalo Clinical and Translational Research Center The Buffalo Translational Consortium (BTC), which includes 12 major academic, research and healthcare institutions and 5 influential community partners in our region, have embarked on a comprehensive strategic plan to build a strong foundation for clinical and translational research in response to our community needs. Buffalo is the second most populous city in New York State and has a rich cultural history. The distribution of underrepresented minorities who experience health disparities in Buffalo in 2015 (50%) parallels that projected for the US in 2050, making Buffalo a microcosm of what the US will look like in 35 years. The vision for our CTSA hub is to develop, test and share novel approaches to improve health and reduce health disparities in our community, which represents a “population of the future”. Improving health in our community and the nation will require innovative research across the full T1 through T4 translational spectrum. In 2012, the University at Buffalo opened the new 170,000 ft2 state-of-the-art Clinical and Translational Research Center (CTRC) devoted entirely to clinical and translational research. The CTRC provides a centralized facility, including translational research laboratories, a clinical research center, an imaging center, a lab animal facility and a biorepository. The CTRC and other enormous BTC investments to build a 21st century Academic Health Center creates a setting for a CTSA to provide the key piece to transform our capacity to bring discoveries in the laboratory, the clinic and the community to benefit individual and public health by sharing expertise and innovative approaches to translational science as part of the national consortium. We will bring strengths to the CTSA consortium, including developing novel health informatics tools, leveraging our strength as a leading center on research in standards and ontologies; new approaches to community-based research developed with our community; testing and disseminating ontology-based methods to share translational image data; and one of the few full service Drug Development Services in the consortium. With a CTSA we will 1) accelerate the development, implementation and dissemination of new healthcare interventions and their translation into the community through innovative research across the T1 through T4 spectrum, 2) train and develop an excellent and diverse workforce to ensure that translational researchers and their teams have the skills and knowledge to advance translation of discoveries, 3) build a translational science pipeline that integrates data from multiple sources and combines data analysis methods to discover diagnostic, therapeutic and preventive interventions, and 4) streamline clinical research processes with a focus on quality to enhance recruitment of special populations across the lifespan and groups with health disparities, and accelerate multi-site clinical trial initiation. Building on our unique strengths will enhance both our local and national CTSA network capacity through collaboration and sharing expertise and resources. Project Summary/Abstract Page 272 Contact PD/PI: Murphy, Timothy F Buffalo Clinical and Translational Research Center