UMB ICTR

“Two years ago in this forum, I mentioned a huge opportunity to bolster our research enterprise: to join with Johns Hopkins University in applying for an NIH Clinical and Translational Science Award. The awards focus on translating laboratory science into the drugs, devices, and treatments that extend and enrich people’s lives. This is what we mean when we say “bench-to bedside” research. This is the translation that gets good science out of the lab. 

These awards are tough to get. It took us two years of working with Hopkins on an application. And I can say to you now that we’ve won it. 

This collaboration is vitally important to the people of Maryland. Because now we can leverage the state’s two biggest medical systems. Together, the University of Maryland Medical System and Johns Hopkins Medicine serve three-quarters of the state’s citizens. This means we can aggregate patient data from both hospital systems to ask research questions in a powerful way — questions about the people we serve and how we care for them. We can link our master’s programs so that our students gain broader and deeper expertise. We can combine aspects of our clinical research infrastructure to develop not only higher-quality programs, but programs with a larger reach across the state.

It’s time that Baltimore’s two most powerful research institutions — its two most powerful anchor institutions — forge an alliance around science. It’s time we did this for our city and our state. And now that we’re in this rarefied group — this most prominent group of clinical research universities — we can get grants that CTSA funded institutions are more likely to get, we can secure resources, and partnerships, and access to expertise reserved for the very best among us. We can build out our Institute for Clinical Translational Research and grow our prominence as a world-class clinical research institution. To Dr. Stephen Davis, Dean Rick Barth, congratulations.”