IndianaCTSI HUB

A Message from the Director:

This brief PowerPoint presentation provides a broad outline of the Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute (CTSI). These slides review the long term mission, the key components and the organizational structure of the Indiana CTSI.

Our Mission Statement:

To increase translational biomedical research and improve the health of people of Indiana and beyond.

Our Overall Goal:

To transform the participating institutions to create an environment that facilitates the conduct of clinical and translational science research. To this end, we have focused on and developed new mechanisms to accelerate translational research, however a newly designed Community Health Engagement Program (CHEP) facilitates effective and bidirectional community partnerships, streamlining of all available research infra-structure to accelerate translational projects, and partnering with commercial and philanthropic organizations in Indiana. Throughout all of these efforts runs the critical link of our medical informatics program, enabling all parties to interact in a facile and responsive and prompt manner. The Indiana CTSI brings together the resources of academic, commercial, and community groups across the state. It provides a "home" to investigators with expertise in a wide range of fields relevant to clinical and translational research.

Our Specific Goals:

Building an "ideal" home for clinical and translational research activities presents significant challenges but also provides extraordinary opportunities to rethink our entire institutional research enterprise. Our approach to this challenge has been to first gather comprehensive information about all of the existing research activities, the number of duplicative functions, and the barriers to translation within the institutions involved. We then proceeded to systematically rethink and reorganize our entire research enterprise. We began with input from the large research community within and outside the academic institutions of Indiana. This information was distilled through a series of weekly workshops with a core group of research leaders from Indiana and Purdue Universities, as well as various representatives of local corporations, not-for-profit organizations, and other interest groups. This work resulted in defining the goals for the Indiana CTSI.

The Five Strategic Goals of the Indiana CTSI:

1. Research: Create translational research acceleration programs and support pilot projects by providing investigators and consumers with strategic leadership and mentorship to identify, evaluate, and support innovative and important pilot research at each step of the translational cycle.
2. Education: Train a new cadre of translational researchers by strengthening existing programs and creating new ones to educate trainees and engage faculty in the translational sciences.
3. Community: Foster robust community engagement by creating novel programs with bidirectional participation (i.e., from academia to the community and back again), such as the Indiana Community Health Engagement Program (CHEP) and pilot programs in Rural and Global Health.
4. Technology: Build facile and comprehensive research resources and technologies by transforming the existing and new research infrastructure into innovative programs such as the Participant and Clinical Interaction Resources (PCIR), Translational Technology Resources (TTR), Research Ethics, Design and Biostatistics Program (DBP), and others to facilitate the translation of research.
5. Partnership: Leverage the resources of the greater Indiana community by connecting to a broad array of resources from multiple partner institutions throughout the state of Indiana, such as the novel disease modeling program with Eli Lilly, and future programs like Global Health, and the Health Economics Program with WellPoint. While we have begun transforming the translational research activities within our institutions in a systematic manner, the funding from the CTSA mechanism will be critical in enabling us to reach the full revolutionary potential of the Indiana CTSI.