Stanford’s Clinical and Translational Research Unit (CTRU), is the institute’s largest, research focused, ambulatory care and laboratory services group offering both adult and pediatric bedside, phlebotomy, dietary, and laboratory services across the research community.

The CTRU is a primary backbone for accelerating the translation of bedside diagnostics and treatments, and advancing research technologies into clinical applications. The center is at the frontier of precision health efforts across the research community. On average, the center is supporting over 350 clinical research studies annually across more than 200 faculty members. The studies stretch across multiple medical disciplines and many are first-in-human trials, with novel therapies that have been discovered and developed at Stanford. The CTRU clinical team consists of highly-specialized research nurses and other medical professionals to support these advanced human subject trials. The laboratory personnel are set up to handle high-volume, longitudinal studies and disease registries that require advanced isolation and distribution of various biofluid and tissue specimens.

As the one-stop shop of sample processing for research, the CTRU is also the central laboratory for bioinventory ultimately managed by the Stanford Biobank. The centralization of these services allows for both quality standardization and alignment with Stanford’s sample management software. The software links to the larger data lake known as BioCatalyst, which is a cutting-edge search engine utilized to review both clinical and molecular annotations related to bioinventory.

The CTRU supports research services in multiple locations across Santa Clara County. The primary research clinic on Welch Road is proximal to Stanford Hospital and Clinics, which is optimal for many trials that utilize standard of care resources at the hospital. The phlebotomy and lab services are also proximal to campus for same-day clinical trial services, while more advanced cellular isolations and other novel methodologies for specimen processing are located at Porter Drive and Arastradero Road.

CTRU is supported by the Stanford CTSA Award Number UL1TR003142 from the National Center for Advancing Translational Science (NCATS), a component of the National Institutes of Health.