Clinical and Translational Obesity Research Core (CTORC)

SUMMARY The Texas Medical Center has many excellent researchers in nutrition and obesity but there are two main gaps preventing additional growth in human related nutrition and obesity research. First, the significant hurdles faced by researchers to perform translational research on human biospecimens prevents the vast majority of researchers from being able to translate findings from preclinical work into humans. Second, the large amount of research in the Texas Medical Center leads to compartmentalized within departments and thus, cross-department knowledge of outside projects is lacking. The Clinical and Translational Obesity Research Core (CTORC) within the Houston Nutrition and Obesity Research Center aims to fill these gaps with the following aims: 1) enhance and expedite translational research by expanding an existing biorepository of human biospecimens and 2) facilitate obesity- and nutrition-related research collaborations across varied researcher interests. To achieve these aims, the CTORC will add biospecimens including blood, fat, and intestine from over 700 subjects who span all ages and weights. We will leverage the NIH-funded Population Science Biorepository for the processing and storage of these samples. This biobank will give our researchers an unprecedented ability to perform translational research for many different nutrition and obesity questions. Second, the CTORC will expand a database of human obesity and nutrition-related studies. Utilizing the information technology infrastructure through Baylor College of Medicine, we have built a database containing information including the demographics of subjects and types of data previously/currently collected in human obesity and nutrition research. This database will allow H-NORC members to easily find collaborators with existing datasets or ongoing relevant projects, thus increasing transparency, decreasing research costs, and increasing research efficiency. We will also provide consultative services for early-career and new-to-the-field researchers in obesity and nutrition to guide them on performing rigorous research in these fields, navigating and utilize the immense resources in the Texas Medical Center, and connecting them with possible collaborators. In summary, the CTORC will leverage and significantly expand existing resources to provide H- NORC members access to relevant human biospecimens as well as providing infrastructure to enhance the transparency of research across our organizations.