Wright Regional Center for Clinical and Translational Science

Summary Project Summary of NCATS Parent Award. 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 diverse 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 Historically Black College and University with expertise to advance workforce diversity.

The Overall Objective of the Wright Regional CCTS is to advance health equity through actively engaging diverse communities, training a diverse research workforce, and supporting the rapid implementation of innovative clinical and translational science (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 with a focus on diversity to ultimately enhance recruitment of diverse patient populations into clinical research. Aim 2: Use health outcomes data to develop tools and methods to document differences in health outcomes

within the community to support the goal of achieving health equity. 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. Impact: The Wright Regional CCTS will build on our strengths in community engaged research to support

innovative translational science tools to address health equity in collaboration with our partners and community. We will enhance the diversity and rural 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 engaged 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. This supplement award will advance the objectives of the parent award UM1TR004360 by training a candidate from an underrepresented minority to perform translational research. Dr. Friedman will benefit from a robust

career development plan and hands on training in clinical and translational science. He will be integrated into the CCTS SKolar CommuniTy that provides career development training for early career investigators. His research will use genetically diverse mice to study musculoskeletal health and identify common mechanisms of

musculoskeletal injury that occur in a diverse population. He will also be trained on how to access clinical data and will use clinical data to help validate this novel pre-clinical model. His research will lead to more equitable health solutions that are applicable to a diverse human population. The research plan, along with the mentoring

and training plan will prepare the candidate, Dr. Friedman, for an independent research career. Dr. Friedman’s research program will be the first to use this novel pre-clinical model that accounts for genetic diversity while investigating interventions for preventing musculoskeletal injury. The training program will prepare him to perform

community-engaged research and translate results from his research into clinical solutions.