First Appeared Friday, 13 July '07

Finding the Missing Links in Translational Research: Nursing Science Critical to Bridging Gaps Between Bench, Bedside and Community

By Andrew Schwartz

In October 2006, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded UCSF more than $100 million to establish a Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) in the next five years. The CTSI will catalyze and integrate clinical and translational efforts across campus, as well as at affiliated institutions and in participating communities. In doing so, the CTSI thrusts clinical and translational work into an unfamiliar position at UCSF: sharing the center spotlight with the bench research upon which the campus has built so much of its reputation.

According to a recent article by J. Michael Bishop, MD, chancellor and Arthur Rock and Toni Rembe Rock Distinguished Professor, in the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce publication Health Care and Biotech in the Bay Area, the seeds for the new prominence of clinical and translational work were sown 1999, when the campus first broke ground for its Mission Bay campus. Because Mission Bay would concentrate so many bench scientists in one location, it would clear the way for UCSF to become a much more significant player in clinical and translational research than it had been historically.

Over the next seven years, the seeds were fertilized by nationwide excitement about the mapping of the human genome (and other scientific discoveries) and nationwide concern that a shortage of clinical researchers and inadequate support for clinical research would slow the application of breakthrough knowledge. The NIH’s recent focus on clinical and translational work is a response to those concerns. UCSF was one of 12 academic medical centers the NIH selected in 2006, all of which are part of the goal of, by 2012, creating a nationwide consortium of departments, centers and institutes focused on translational work.

Unsurprisingly, the CTSI has generated considerable excitement across UCSF. At the School of Nursing, much of the excitement revolves around the hope that the institute is a rare opportunity to highlight the value nursing science has long brought to the process of safely speeding scientific discovery to the people who need it most.

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