Translational medicine: From the lab to the bedside

Memphis Business Journal
October 19, 2007
By Toby Sells

There is a movement in the medical world that seeks to unlock the power of more secrets discovered in American laboratories and tell them to those who really need to hear it -- sick people.

In broad terms it's called translational medicine or translational research. So far, this push to bring discoveries from the laboratory bench to the patient's bedside has meant an influx of cash to some Tennessee universities and business opportunities for those with capital to invest.

"The whole concept stemmed from the fact that there's a lot of good things that have been discovered that haven't gotten out there to the community," says Leonard Johnson, vice chancellor for research at University of Tennessee Health Science Center.

With that, the National Institutes of Health stepped in. When Elias A. Zerhouni became director of the NIH in 2002, he set out to chart a new road map for medical research. A part of the map included retooling the clinical research enterprise. So, the NIH's National Center for Research Resources directed a portion of its budget to giving multi-million dollar awards to organizations, mainly universities, to set up institutes for translational research.

The first round of these Clinical and Translational Science Awards went to 12 organizations including the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine , Yale University and University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. The first round of awards cost the NIH $100 million.

The NIH announced the second round of awards in September 2007 and the $547 million went to 12 more universities including Case Western Reserve University and Vanderbilt University. A news release at the time announced new funding guidelines to help the agency meet its goal of a $500 million operating budget among 60 institutions by 2012.

UTHSC applied for one of the second round of awards but missed the mark, says Johnson. The university ranked 24th on the list, so if the NIH wants 60 of these centers nationally, there's a good chance UTHSC will get one. They've already begun the application process for the third round of awards.

That application for a $5 million annual award is due in November.

"We've got the (Clinical and Translational Science) institute here already and it has been approved at the university level and by the Tennessee Higher Education Commission. Now we have to fund it," Leonard says. "The university has to make a pretty good commitment in order to get one of these grants. Part of that commitment is $6.8 million for the space in the pharmacy building and that money is in hand."

Johnson says UTHSC's department of preventative medicine does about $8 million in clinical trials per year. But, he says, the overall program is fragmented and isn't as centralized as it is in some larger schools. The two floors in the proposed $42 million College of Pharmacy will help to change that as the department will move its labs and people to one space.

When Vanderbilt University got its $40 million award in September, it was the largest government research grant the school had ever received. That money will be spent over five years, but the university is not building anything new for awhile, says vice chancellor for research Gordon Bernard.

"We've refined some things in place and have come up with some new systems," Bernard says.

The university has set up a Web-based match-making service to connect people with ideas and people who know what to do with them.

"Somebody can have an idea and not know the next step but with this you can get online and look around and the next thing you know you're sitting in a room talking to people about that idea," Bernard says.

The Vanderbilt Institute for Translational and Clinical Research has also begun to offer $2,000 to researchers for tests like blood samples to prove whether or not they have a good idea on their hands. Since the program began eight months ago, they have handed out nearly $100,000 to help these projects along.

The school does plan to construct a tangible VITCR. But that building, Bernard says, would house only the "dry elements" of research -- biostatistics, bioinformatics and the outpatient research center.

Also, Vanderbilt now belongs to the NIH's translational consortium and can use any of the other 23 sites that have received awards as a resource.

As a part of that consortium, the schools meet regularly. Bernard says these meetings serve as focus sessions to help fix current clinical research processes. With the consortium growing in numbers, it can hold greater sway on issues like negotiating research contracts with pharmaceutical companies.

"We can change things just by our sheer power of a group in numbers and now there's 24 of us across the country," he says.

The hope is, too, that these centers will spawn more relationships with researchers and investors. Ted Townsend, chief administrative officer and vice president of arGentis Pharmaceuticals LLC, says his Memphis biopharmaceutical company wouldn't be where it is without the decades of scleroderma research of UTHSC rheumatologists.

"We've already had many people find our Web site who suffer from this," Townsend says. "They know we're still a year or so away from having a treatment, but they're glad to know somebody's working on it."

The final stage in that translation from the bench at a UT lab will produce a treatment for systemic sclerosis, a disease that attacks the immune system. arGentis is preparing to launch its final FDA approval tests, which will take another 18 months. A product launch is expected soon after that.

UT Health Science Center

Academic medicine
Interim chancellor: Hershel Wall
Phone: (901) 448-5500
Web site: www.utmem.edu

Vanderbilt Institute for Clinical and Transitional Research

Principal investigator: Gordon Bernard
Phone: (615) 322-7311
Web site: www.vanderbilt.edu

arGentis Pharmaceuticals LLC

CEO: Tom Davis
Address: 20 South Dudley
Phone: (901) 448-1580
Web site: www.argentisrx.com

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