Wright Regional Center for Clinical and Translational Science

Building on the VCU C. Kenneth and Dianne Wright Center for Clinical and Translational Research and its research endowment, the Wright Regional Center for Clinical and Translational Science (Wright Regional CCTS) is a collaboration of partner institutions that serves regions of Virginia and North Carolina, including Eastern Virginia Medical School, a community focused medical school in Norfolk, Virginia with a strong community engaged research program in low income housing; Old Dominion University, a public university in Norfolk Virginia with strengths in machine learning and AI techniques for biomedical data; Virginia Commonwealth University, a public university in Richmond, Virginia which has been a CTSA hub since 2010, with strengths in community engaged research; and Virginia State University, a regional university with expertise in training a research workforce that can engage the populations we serve. The Overall Objective of the Wright Regional CCTS is to promote opportunities for optimal health for all by actively partnering with a wide range of communities, training a research workforce that can engage the populations served, and supporting the rapid implementation of innovative CTS with our partners and collaborators and throughout the CTSA program. This will be carried out though the following Specific Aims: Aim 1: Enhance translational research workforce development to improve the recruitment of a broad range of patient populations into clinical research. Aim 2: Utilize health outcomes data to develop tools and methods to determine how to improve overall health outcomes across all communities. Aim 3: Promote protocol review and oversight to enhance the quality of clinical research and reduce the timeline for regulatory approval. Aim 4: Work together across partner and collaborator institutions to use informatics data and tools to promote interoperability of data for high impact clinical research. Aim 5: Build on our existing community engagement and telehealth infrastructure to enhance recruitment of hard-to-reach low income and rural patient populations into clinical research. The Wright Regional CCTS will build on our strengths in community engaged research to support innovative translational science tools to promote opportunities for optimal health for all in collaboration with our partners and community. We will enhance the broad impact of our translational research workforce, extend protocol review and oversight processes to improve the quality and efficiency of clinical research, develop innovative methods to engage hard to reach low-income and rural patient populations in clinical research, and disseminate and implement successful CTS programs in our community and across the CTSA network.