The CTSC is pleased to recognize the achievement of Cleveland Clinic's CTSC-funded Clinical Research Unit. The Clinical Research Unit team received Cleveland Clinic's highest honor in an annual award ceremony, accepting a Caregiver Award in the category of Teamwork. Chosen after an extensive selection process, the team's members represent the "best of the best" among Cleveland Clinic for outstanding contributions and initiatives representing Cleveland Clinic's mission, vision and values. 

Cleveland Clinic Clinical Research Unit Team on stage receiving the Caregiver Excellence Award for Teamwork, April 2014.

Under the leadership of Serpil Erzurum, MD, Wilson Tang, MD, and Lara Jehi, MD, this dedicated group of physicians, nurses, lab technicians, administrators, informaticists, and research coordinators, managed and executed nearly 200 clinical research projects in the past year. They conducted 4,000 research patient visits, covering 35 medical specialties, while collecting and processing 20,000 human lab samples. Accomplishing this required meticulous and extensive monitoring of complex research protocols, targeted weekend interventions, and dispatching team members to study locations that met the needs of participants. The Award honors the team's hard work, collaboration, and commitment.

The Clinical Research Unit is a centralized facility designed to provide an optimal clinical research setting. The Unit, one of three funded within the Clinical & Translational Science Collaborative, provides inpatient and outpatient settings for investigators and their research participants, ensuring a caring clinical research environment and proper adherence to protocols. For more information on utilizing the Clinical Research Units visit their website.      

Please join us in congratulating the Cleveland Clinic Clinical Research Unit on this outstanding achievement.

Brian Cobb, PhD
Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine  "Liver-Mediated Immune Regulation"

Please join us in congratulating Dr. Cobb's success!

Practice-Based Research Networks (PBRNs) are organizations of community healthcare practices that collaborate with academic and community partners to improve health care through translational research, particularly primary care delivered in community practices. PBRNs were developed to assure that research leads to better health outcomes because it is informed by front-line community based clinicians. In PBRNs, clinicians are involved in the entire research process, including determining the research agenda, framing and defining the research questions, informing the design of the study, participating in data collection, interpreting study results, disseminating study findings, and incorporating new knowledge into clinical practice.

The federal government regards persons with developmental disabilities (DD) to be a "priority population" for research, and many governmental agencies include them in their lists of "medically underserved populations." Developmental disabilities include a wide variety of chronic conditions that cause significant lifelong physical or mental impairments. Examples include intellectual disabilities of any cause, cerebral palsy, autism spectrum disorder, and Down syndrome.

For the past 20 years, Dr. Carl Tyler MD, MSc, a practicing physician at the Cleveland Clinic, has focused his work on improving the health and health care of persons with DD through clinical care, research, education, and training. After completing a 3-year NIH-sponsored fellowship in Practice-Based Research Design and Methodology at CWRU under mentors and PBRN Shared Resource Directors James Werner PhD MSSA and Kurt Stange MD PhD, Dr. Tyler received additional funding to create a Development Disabilities Learning Collaborative with local stakeholders. The success of the DD Learning Collaborative led to the creation of the Developmental Disabilities (DD) PBRN. The network is devoted to conducting translational research with developmentally disabled patients and their health and service providers.

The DD PBRN is the only PBRN in the country dedicated to conducting translational research with DD patients and their health and service providers. In addition to receiving infrastructure support from the PBRN Shared Resource, this new PBRN is supported by high levels of stakeholder investment including the Arc of Greater Cleveland, United Cerebral Palsy of Greater Cleveland, clinicians from local hospital systems, residential care providers, as well as patients with developmental disabilities and their family advocates. This diverse group has excellent research potential and recently submitted a proposal to the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute for an investigation to be conducted within the DD PBRN.

If you are interested in engaging the DD PBRN, please contact the PBRN Shared Resource at pbrn@case.edu or 216-368-4622, or visit their website.

• ChemoID technology can assist in optimal chemotherapeutic selection
• Should this technology be adopted by the Case Comprehensive Cancer Center, Cordgenics' services could be brought to University Hospitals and the Cleveland Clinic, promoting the medical industry and job growth in Ohio
• Cordgenics' relationship with the Edwards Comprehensive Cancer Center at Huntington Hospital/Marshall University could be leveraged to be part of the OCTC's future site expansion.

• ChemoID® Drug Sensitivity Testing for Personalized Chemotherapy
• Screening of Drugs for Pharmaceutical companies to target Cancer Stem Cells
• Drug Delivery Technologies

Congratulations to the following, who were selected from a highly competitive pool of applicants, as clinical scholars within the Clinical & Translational Science Collaborative (CTSC) KL2 career development program starting July 1, 2014:

NINDS CREATE Devices: Translational and Clinical Studies to Inform Final Device Design (UH2/UH3) Grant: Learn More. 

NINDS CREATE Devices: Translational and Early Feasibility Studies on the Path to  Pre-Market Approval (PMA) or Humanitarian Device Exemption (HDE) (UH2/UH3) Grant: Learn More.

NINDS CREATE Devices: Translational and Clinical Studies on the Path to 510(k) (UH2/UH3) Grant: Learn More.