The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded a $38 million clinical and translational sciences grant to support a partnership between Georgetown’s Medical Center and Howard University.

The two Washington, D.C., universities will use the grant to form the Georgetown-Howard Universities Center for Clinical and Translational Science (GHUCCTS) in an effort to transform health care and preventive practices in communities through medical discoveries made in laboratories and clinical settings. The universities will receive the $38.2 million grant over five years, beginning this month.

“The GHUCCTS underscores our commitment not only to excellent biomedical research, but to rapidly translating research findings that can impact our broader community,” says Dr. Howard Federoff, executive vice president for health sciences at Georgetown and executive dean for the School of Medicine. “This highly collaborative network will make significant contributions to scientific knowledge and should impact human health by better informing our decisions about prevention, diagnosis and treatment of a variety of diseases.”

The new center will allow researchers to collaborate with MedStar Health/MedStar Health Research Institute in Hyattsville, Md., Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn., and the Washington DC Veterans Affairs Medical Center to form one of the nation’s largest biomedical and clinical research networks.

Dr. Joseph Verbalis, professor of medicine and chief of the Division of Endocrinology and Metabolism at Georgetown, and Dr. Thomas Mellman, professor of psychiatry and associate dean for clinical and translational research at Howard, will jointly lead the new center and serve as principal investigators.

“The collaboration of multiple major teaching hospitals in the Washington, D.C., area will create one of the largest clinical research networks in the country, says Verbalis. “We will creatively combine considerable institutional strengths and talents in ways to enable the application of a larger breadth of resources for clinical and translational research than are available at each of our individual institutions.”

The grant will support 109 positions, including faculty, research staff, administration and nursing.
Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.), a long-standing advocate for the health care needs of D.C. residents, says the new center allows physicians and researchers to effectively address issues of those who historically have been underserved.

“This vital collaboration between Georgetown University and Howard University is unique in its deliberate and thoughtful focus on clinically important research that will directly impact underserved populations in the District including minorities, the aged and disabled,” she says.