Researchers at Boston University are edging closer to breakthrough lung disease treatments: testing ways to use a patient’s own cells in new therapies and collaborating with a global biopharma company to identify new drug targets . The work, which has been advancing for nearly 20 years, started with a crucial injection of early funding and support from the BU Clinical & Translational Science Institute (CTSI) .
The institute’s mission—to help turn scientific discoveries into lifesaving medical treatments and tools—has just been given a major boost with a multimillion-dollar injection of fresh funding from the National Institutes of Health.
The $41 million grant from the NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) will fund the CTSI’s efforts—such as providing research resources and funding, training and mentoring programs, access to core facilities and data sources, and community engagement—for the next seven years.
Founded in 2008, the CTSI is a partnership between BU and the Boston Medical Center Health System, which includes the University’s primary teaching hospital. Under the new award, the Veterans Affairs (VA) Boston Healthcare System, a longtime collaborator, will join the institute’s leadership. A central part of the CTSI’s mission is bringing together scientists, engineers, and clinicians across the organizations—and building connections to patients and their needs.
“Our vision is to bring new discoveries to the communities that we serve—patients, scientists, and students,” says David Center , the institute’s founding primary investigator and BU’s associate provost for translational research. “We’re really looking to be, and have been, an institute that starts with educating and ends with products that help improve individuals’ health and cure disease.”
The grant is part of NCATS’ Clinical and Translational Science Awards Program and will be accompanied by a research training grant for predoctoral students (led by BU’s Darrell N. Kotton and Matthew R. Jones ) and an award to support early-career physician-scientists (led by the University’s Natalia E. Morone and Renda S. Wiener ). Together, all three NIH grants will total $50 million.
“Science Without Walls”
The institute has supported hundreds of faculty and community members from departments across BU and Boston Medical Center (BMC), with projects spanning individualized medicine, infectious diseases, stroke recovery, overdose prevention, and other issues.
The lung research project grew out of CTSI’s support for researchers building a stem cell biobank for use by BU investigators. That initial project evolved into the Center for Regenerative Medicine of BU and BMC , a world-leading stem cell and regenerative medicine hub that’s pioneering treatments for a host of conditions, such as neurodegenerative, cardiovascular, and gastrointestinal disorders—as well as lung disease.
The grant will allow the CTSI to expand its work and reach, including with the launch of new workforce development programs, team science activities like research jams, and closer collaborations with BU’s artificial intelligence, bioinformatics, and data science experts. According to the institute’s leaders, a driving theme for the next seven years will be “science without walls.”
“The BU CTSI is a forum to bring people together across disciplines, to think about research and answers for some really tenacious problems,” says Megan Bair-Merritt , Boston Medical Center Health System’s chief scientific officer and one of CTSI’s directors. She’s also a BU Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine professor of pediatrics. “The ultimate goal of people across our campuses is to improve the health of our communities, and the best way to do that is to have a range of voices and perspectives.”
CTSI funding has led to more than 1,700 publications, while its support for 24 affinity research collaboratives —which bring investigators from multiple disciplines together around a common goal, such as Alzheimer’s disease or women’s health—has helped spark close to $300 million in outside funding. At least 20 patents have resulted from CTSI-backed projects, which have also informed more than 500 policy documents and clinical guidelines from 45 countries and intergovernmental organizations.
“If you’re a university- or hospital-based researcher, you want to do research that’s meaningful for the patients you serve,” says Center, a BMC clinician and the Gordon and Ruth Snider Professor of Pulmonary Medicine at the BU medical school.
Opportunities for Collaboration
Because the CTSI covers three major research institutions in BU, BMC, and the VA, it can help connect researchers with data from some of the nation’s biggest health-focused investigations, including the BU-led Framingham Heart Study . Having the VA on board also pulls in the Million Veteran Program , a study of genes, military experience, lifestyle, and health—and one of the largest projects of its kind in the world.
“Bringing the enormous intellectual talent and resources of a comprehensive university to bear on the problems of war veterans may be the greatest benefit of our involvement in the CTSI,” says Terence M. Keane , the VA Boston Healthcare System’s associate chief of staff for research and a director at the National Center for PTSD.
Keane is now part of the CTSI leadership team. He says that the VA Boston’s resources—from its clinical programs to its hundreds of researchers—are also an asset to BU and BMC.
“Collaborating with VA investigators to frame important questions for the entire US population has been, and will continue to be, a true advantage for BU investigators across schools and departments,” says Keane, who’s also a professor of psychiatry and clinical psychology at BU. “Providing new faculty with opportunities to collaborate across the BU, BMC, and VA Boston research communities will propel the careers of young investigators while enhancing our national and international reputation.”
Among the rising star researchers who’ve benefited from past CTSI support is Lou Awad , a BU Sargent College of Health & Rehabilitation Sciences associate professor of physical therapy. As a young investigator, he won multiple pilot grants and a career development award from the institute. Today, as an experienced researcher in his own right, he’s paying that back.
Awad is building a CTSI team that will help researchers teach patients and community members how to use new medical devices and gadgets, overcoming barriers that can sometimes stifle the at-home success of new healthcare technologies. His own research has focused on using robotic devices to help people recover from stroke.
“The CTSI helped catalyze my academic career through grant awards, grant writing mentorship, and clinical research services. My very first three faculty grants were from the CTSI,” says Awad. His lab is based on BU’s Charles River Campus, and the institute helped it add clinical expertise and capabilities to studies.
Awad encourages his colleagues to explore how it can augment and accelerate their work: “Its mission is to make you better. Odds are that your individual project or lab are unknowingly replicating a capability or resource that the CTSI already has mastered.”