From Our Labs to Your Lives

Robert Rizza, M.D.
Director of the new Mayo Clinic Center for Translational Science Activities

Sherine Gabriel, M.D.
Director of CTSA Education Resources

K. Sreekumaran Nair, M.D.
Endocrinologist and director of CTSA Research Resources

Michael Joyner, M.D. Anesthesiologist and director of the CTSA Service Center

Mayo Clinic is Creating an "Information Infobahn" to Speed Research Discoveries to Patients

The world's best-selling and most effective anticancer chemotherapy drug, Taxol, took nearly 30 years to reach patients.

The reason: Derived from the bark of the Pacific yew trees native to the forests of the U.S. Northwest Coast, Taxol lumbered through a tortuous network of cottage industries — chemists, foresters, botanists, researchers, loggers, various drug companies — with no single agency committed to guiding its development.

As a result of the many missteps that occurred until pharmaceutical company Bristol-Myers Squibb finally brought Taxol to market in 1994, thousands of cancer patients were deprived of potential benefits from its anti-tumor effects.

Mayo Clinic intends to see that this story of lost opportunities for promising new therapies never happens again. It is in a leadership position to do so because it was recently named one of 12 academic medical centers in the United States to receive the newly created Clinical and Translational Science Award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Over the next five years, Mayo Clinic will receive $72.5 million from the NIH to establish the Mayo Clinic Center for Translational Science Activities (CTSA). "Our goal is to translate today's discoveries into tomorrow's cure," says Dr. Robert Rizza, director for both Mayo research and the new center. "The center will do this by coordinating the efforts of Mayo's outstanding clinical research education and training programs, our world-class scientists and clinical research investigators and Mayo Clinic's vast scientific resources to speed the process of turning our discoveries into the new medications and treatments our patients need and expect."

The Mayo Clinic CTSA will:

Prepare the next generation of translational medicine experts.
Clinicians and scientists will be trained in new programs dedicated to translating research to quickly benefit patients' lives. The Mayo Graduate School will use part of the NIH funding to add a Ph.D. in clinical and translational science. Students will choose a focus either in basic sciences or medicine (for an MD/PhD). In addition to mastery in their focus area of coursework, the curriculum will prepare them to develop and design innovative clinical research studies, secure funding and lead interdisciplinary research teams. "There is a real need for this kind of focused training," says Dr. Sherine Gabriel, director of CTSA Education Resources. "We are thrilled to be able to be among the first in the country to provide it."

Expand the highly regarded and innovative research resources available to Mayo Clinic researchers.
The center provides advanced technology facilities, nursing and dietetic staff for clinical researchers at two Mayo hospitals in Rochester. Says K. Sreekumaran Nair, M.D., endocrinologist and director of CTSA Research Resources (former General Clinical Research Center ): "The physician-scientist who both sees patients and conducts research is becoming an endangered species — and our facility is committed to changing that by expanding our excellence in clinical research in novel ways." For example, under the new NIH funding, a mobile clinical research unit has been created that can reach patients in all areas of a hospital, not just in designated research units. This will allow more types of patients — and more physicians — to participate in clinical research.

Create an "infobahn" — an analogy to Germany's famed high-speed travel network, the Autobahn —
that centralizes information and streamlines processes so researchers spend less time with paperwork related to grants and more time in the lab or with patients. Explains Dr. Michael Joyner, anesthesiologist and director of the CTSA Service Center: "Right now, the pace of medical discovery is slowed down by a rutted road that's full of potholes. We're not just going to patch the potholes to make things more efficient, we're building an autobahn for researchers so they can spend most of their time doing what they do best: research, not paperwork. And after the autobahn, we'll build the bullet train to make the process direct, simple and as fast as possible."