Sunday, November 13, 2011

State Leveraging Novel Ideas

The Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute (CTSI) has partnered with GVK Biosciences, Asia’s leading Contract Research Organization to provide researchers in the U.S. access to the GVK BIO’s Clinical Biomarker Database (GOBIOM). The goal is to advance research on a wide range of diseases.

The Indiana CTSI Bioinformatics Core and Indiana Institute for Personalized Medicine will work together to manage the process so that researchers will have access the new resource. Anantha Shekhar, Director of the Indiana CTSI, said, “The Indiana CTSI is very pleased to partner with the Indiana Institute for Personalized Medicine to make this resource available to all clinical and translational researchers in the national consortium and also to partner with the Indiana Economic Development Corporation.”

GOBIOM houses a comprehensive collection of all clinically evaluated exploratory and preclinical biomarkers associated with different therapeutic areas reported in global clinical trials and preclinical studies. The resource will be available nationwide to 55 medical centers and universities supported by the NIH CTSI awards.

The Regenstrief Institute established in 1969 by Sam Regenstrief on the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis campus and supported by the Regenstrief Foundation and closely affiliated with the Indiana University School of Medicine and the Health and Hospital Corporation of Marion County, Indiana is involved has announced another project to stimulate innovation.

The Regenstrief Institute just announced a $500,000 grant to launch an initiative to propel innovation. This innovative program will focus on providing higher quality, lower cost healthcare, and encourage research teams to work together to develop high risk, high reward ideas that could help to find and develop new approaches to perplexing problems.

This new innovation program is seeking creative ideas that might not be proposed or considered for traditional grant funding to enable Regenstrief investigators to prove the feasibility of ideas before submitting more substantial proposals to funding agencies. A recent call for proposals is encouraging investigators to not only submit their ideas but also to learn from many other successful organizations such as Google and Facebook.

“Innovation is our core business,” said Regenstrief Institute President and CEO, William Tierney, M.D. discussing the new innovative initiative. “Working out ideas by proving feasibility and obtaining pilot data will give our investigators a leg up on their peers in competing for increasingly scarce research dollars.”

For more information, go to www.regenstrief.org.