The Institute for Clinical and Translational Science at UC Irvine: Building an Inquisitive Environment Where Everything Is Questioned and There Is No Status Quo

CTSA Profile The Institute for Clinical and Translational Science at UC Irvine: Building an Inquisitive Environment Where Everything Is Questioned and There Is No Status Quo Vince Caiozzo, Ph.D., Dan M. Cooper, M.D., Steve Cramer, M.D., Pietro Galassetti, M.D., Ph.D., Ruth Mulnard, R.N., D.N.Sc., Danh Nguyen, Ph.D., Dele Ogunseitan, Ph.D., Ellen Olshansky, R.N., Ph.D., Andria Pontello, M.B.A., and Margaret Schneider, Ph.D. Introduction T he University of California, Irvine, is one of the prestigious University of California family of campuses. It is a young and dynamic institution with a student population of 22,000 undergraduates and 5,000 graduates. The Times of London selected UC Irvine in both 2012 and 2013 as one of the top five young (less-than-50-years-old) universities in the world. Academic development in the past decade has been particularly robust with the addition of new Schools of Law and Education, and Programs in Nursing Science, Pharmaceutical Science, and Public Health. The School of Medicine and the UC Irvine Health clinical enterprise comprise the only academic health center in the central region of southern California. We are emerging as a catalyst for healthcare reform and clinical translational investigation, both regionally and globally. We are situated in one of the most ethnically and socioeconomically diverse, vibrant, and rapidly growing population centers (approximately 3 million people) in the United States—an ideal platform for the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS, our parent organization at the National Institutes of Health [NIH]) vision of translational research that begins in the laboratory and reaches out to all aspects of the community. In this review, we briefly describe the concerted efforts of our Clinical Translational Science Award (CTSA), funded originally in 2010 to harness the energy of what had been loosely interconnected hubs of biomedical research excellence, training, and health care, and to transform these into a creative, flexible, and proactive home for clinical translational science. Our Mission and Guiding Principles We have embraced the NCATS mission “to catalyze the generation of innovative methods and technologies that will enhance the development, testing, and implementation of diagnostics and therapeutics across a wide range of human diseases and conditions.” The ICTS vision is straightforward, “To become a global leader in advancing healthcare discovery through translational science.” This vision is guided by a set of key principles and strategies: (1) Establishing a nimble infrastructure that facilitates new and existing technology to provide novel, frequent, and effective support for the translational connection, be it in the laboratory, hospital, clinic, or community. (2) Facilitating the formation of teams of investigators that transcend traditional silos, include physicians, nurses, basic scientists, and community partners, and share information openly and frequently. (3) Providing, perhaps most importantly, in the words of Dr. George Gregory (one of the discoverers of continuous positive airway pressure that revolutionized the respiratory care of critically ill patients), “an inquisitive environment where everything is questioned and there is no status quo.” 1 The UC Irvine ICTS “Ecosystem” Within the university—“crossing boundaries” When the NIH announced its plans to radically reconfigure its vision and support for translational research almost 10 years ago, 2 the task of bringing together the elements necessary for a successful CTSA application was daunting for a comparatively small academic health center such as ours. Our challenge was to uncover and coalesce a wide range of skill and talent, ranging from expertise in mining the electronic health record for cohort discovery to engaging faculty skilled in translational research bioethics, study design, and statistics. We addressed these challenges by crossing traditional academic boundaries and integrating key concepts of multi-, trans-, and interdisciplinary team science into our organizational ethos from its inception. Examples of this include: (1) Our designation as a UC Irvine campus-wide center, which facilitated our ability to interact with schools, institutes, and centers outside of the School of Medicine. (2) Strong collaboration with the UC Irvine Program in Nursing Science and Public Health. (3) Initial leadership in study design, bioinformatics, and biostatistics through the UC Irvine Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Science. (4) An integrated medical informatics unit that engaged existing leaders of the electronic health records management of the UC Irvine Medical Center with researchers and scholars in academic departments. (5) Technology incubation infrastructure that brought together faculty from diverse schools including Physical Sciences, Engineering, and Social Ecology. Institute for Clinical and Translational Science, University of California at Irvine, Irvine, California, USA. Correspondence: Dan M. Cooper (dcooper@uci.edu) DOI: 10.1111/cts.12177 WWW.CTSJOURNAL.COM VOLUME 7 • ISSUE 4