General Clinical Research Center

[unreadable] DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This grant proposal requests the funds necessary for continued support of the General Clinical Research Center of the School of Medicine of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The UNC GCRC is among a handful of centers continuously funded since the inception of the program in the early 1960's. The mission statement of the UNC GCRC is: [unreadable] "To promote patient-oriented research by providing training, specialized expertise, and highest quality patient care in a professional and user friendly environment." [unreadable] In this application, we summarize the many positive trends that have occurred since the last renewal, including a steady increase in the productivity of our investigators as measured by their annual NIH grant support, the number of publications derived from GCRC supported studies, and the remarkable number of junior GCRC investigators supported by both institutional and individual K awards. Only 3 of the 19 publications we have chosen to highlight were been published before 2005, and K awardees are principal authors on 6 of these 19. We describe the critical importance of the UNC GCRC not just to the School of Medicine, but to the entire regional research community that encompasses all five schools of the Health Affairs Campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and neighboring institutions such as the NIEHS and the EPA. We further document that our center's tradition of supporting diverse scientific disciplines has continued. We also describe the central and expanding role of the GCRC in education, training, and career development across the spectrum of health professions. This includes the year long GCRC Medical Student Clinical Research Fellowship, which has expanded to include 11 students in the current cohort, a novel "hands on" clinical research training experience for MD-PhD students, and UNC's highly successful institutional K awards including the newly funded Roadmap K12. We also describe the very productive Oral and Systemic Disease Component, which was funded as a supplement during the current grant cycle. We discuss how this program provides the infrastructure for training of dentist-scientists, and for collaboration between physician and dentist-scientists in several new areas of research. Finally, we describe the unprecedented expansion of support for clinical and translational research that is currently underway on the UNC campus and explain how this will increase the influence and utilization of the GCRC in the next grant cycle. [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable]