Clinical Center to Open Doors to Grantees?

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photo of NIH Clinical Center entranceLast week at the NIH Advisory Committee to the Director meeting, John Gallin, head of the NIH Clinical Center, and I presented the early progress of a committee developed to examine how we can promote the Clinical Center as a national resource by extending its capabilities to you, the extramural community. The NIH Clinical Center is the nation’s largest hospital devoted entirely to clinical research. Currently used for intramural research by 18 of NIH’s institutes and centers, the Clinical Center has a wide variety of world-class or unique research services and resources that we think the extramural community will also find valuable. We are currently determining how we can provide both services and training and how to support collaborations between intramural and extramural investigators to take advantage of the broad range of resources the Clinical Center can provide.

We started with the low hanging fruit and are drafting a program that would provide access to the pharmaceutical development facility for our grantees and contract recipients. We recognize there could well be other resources such as the metabolic unit and the PET program where collaborations with extramural investigators could be established. We are also looking at ways to use and possibly expand the current Bench-to-Bedside program to promote collaboration between extramural basic scientists and intramural clinical investigators, with the goal of understanding important diseases and translating basic science into new therapeutics.

We are excited to provide this opportunity to you. But we want to make sure that if we build it, you will come, so look for further opportunities to provide input on your interest in accessing the NIH Clinical Center resources. I’ll keep you posted on our progress.

8 Comments

  1. Great idea! Extramural basic scientists can indeed benefit from collaboration with the intramural clinical investigators.
    My company belongs to a group of NIH SBIR grant recipients that are not basic scientists in the sense of being those who study biological processes in depth. We develop technologies that enhance pharmaceutical development capabilities for the basic scientists. I hope we would also have a chance to participate in the proposed collaboration between the extramural and intramural communities. Some ways to promote such collaboration would be
    (1) Creating a forum that brings together intramural pharmaceutical development staff with extramural technology developers,
    (2) Soliciting proposals from extramural grant recipients to enhance capabilities of the pharmaceutical development facility,
    (3) Fellowship program at the pharmaceutical development facility giving a chance to the extramural grant recipients to have an extended stay at the facility.
    Hope this comment is helpful.

  2. I would love to be able to try a clinical trial of 2 compounds against diabetes or global ischemia/hypoglycemia.

  3. I am certainly interested and would be interested in direct discussion about how we could work together

  4. We would very much like to explore how the NIH Clinical Center may help advance promising new drug candidates

  5. Would the clinical center be available to SBIR candidates who are currently working on the NIH omnibus solicitation? The various NIH agencies have stated that since NIH is the funding institute that they may not conduct the clinical trial on a new product. Therefore, would this ruling be lifted to accommodate small businesses so that the use of the center would provide a lower cost bases as opposed to using a clinical research organization?

    1. Kelly, the details are yet to be worked out, and we cannot make any assumptions about costing.

  6. Thanks for the positive responses. At this point, though, it’s premature to talk about potential collaborations. However, if these programs move forward, we will be providing more information here in the blog and in the NIH Guide for Grants and Contracts. Stay tuned.

  7. It would be useful for extramural researchers to have a repository where one can store samples from NIH funded research for the long term for future expansions with additional funding from NIH or other sources.

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