Diabetes Clinical and Translational Core

DIABETES CLINICAL AND TRANSLATIONAL CORE (DCTC): PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT The goal of the Stanford Clinical & Translational Core (CTC) is to facilitate high-impact diabetes research by SDRC members. At Stanford, pioneers in cutting-edge technologies of diverse science fields are often in search of clinical collaborators with human subjects to ‘translate’ their findings to the clinic. Similarly, clinical investigators often fail to innovate based on a lack of awareness or accessibility to improved or novel methodologies. In addition, teams of scientists and clinicians attempting to translate their work often encounter hurdles with regulatory processes, sample management, and thoughtful data collection, or analysis empowered by modern analysis, leading to inefficient use of time, sample loss, failure to complete studies, and disincentive to provide banked samples for collaborators. The CTC addresses these specific needs by leveraging existing Stanford resources to focus on diabetes-specific research, thus enhancing our institution’s ability to perform innovative high-impact interdisciplinary studies that surpass the capabilities of a single investigator/laboratory. The CTC team is led by directors that are national leaders in their fields of diabetes- related research, and provides three core services: 1) Advanced support in analytics including study design, database design with setup of data capture, and linkage to the electronic medical record and biorepository, data management, and data analysis, and 2) A Bio-repository - unique at Stanford - of prospectively collected human tissue samples with standardization of collection and sample tracking, and links to clinical data, all accessible via a centralized hub. 3) The CTC will orient SDRC investigators and their teams and train them to use each of these core services effectively. In addition, the CTC is well-integrated with the Clinical Trials Research Unit (CTRU) of the Stanford CTSA-supported “SPECTRUM” programs for clinical and translational research. This integration improves efficient clinical sample collection and clinical assays for designing studies, recording data, logging samples, and linking sample results to phenotypic and metabolic data. Thus, institution- wide support exists for collaborative and “team” science, for modernizing data collection methods, and for resource sharing. The CTC will continue to leverage expertise in scientific methods and research-support systems developed on campus but that are underused or not yet tailored to diabetes research. Use of the CTC by SDRC members will advance the planning, execution and communication of coordinated, collaborative, and transformative clinical and translational research. The CTC will also serve new SDRC members at the Universities of California at Berkeley or at Davis, including those supported through the proposed Regional Pilot & Feasibility Award expansion. Based on growth of the SDRC membership, evolution of exciting new services like the CTC Bio-repository and increasing membership demand for human tissue and cell studies, we anticipate growth in use of the specialized and unique CTC services in the coming years.