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$70 Million CTSA renewal grant awarded to
Stanford Medicine

RENEWAL GRANT TO FUND TRANSLATIONAL SCIENCE ACTIVITIES THROUGH 2031

NOVEMBER 2024

Dr. Ruth O'HaraDr. Ruth O'Hara

Stanford Medicine’s Center for Clinical and Translational Research and Education (Spectrum) has received a $70 million Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The grant funds will help accelerate the translation of newly discovered medical treatments into successful interventions that improve patient care and population health.

Development of the comprehensive grant proposal was led by Principal Investigator Dr. Ruth O’Hara, who is the School of Medicine’s Senior Associate Dean of Research and the Lowell W. and Josephine Q. Berry Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. The grant was awarded after a lengthy, competitive, and rigorous evaluation process. It is the largest CTSA award ever won by Stanford, which has received three previous CTSA grants, and one of the largest awarded by NIH. The new grant spans seven years, 2024 – 2031.

“Through the CTSA program Stanford has been developing innovative solutions to impact the processes for turning laboratory, clinic, and community observations into interventions that improve the health of patients and the public,” stated O’Hara. “This award will allow us to become even more effective at discovering and implementing strategies that serve the health needs of diverse individuals and populations, from the earliest stages of the translational pipeline to the final mile where the patient benefits.”

"This award will allow us to become even more effective at discovering and implementing strategies that serve the health needs of diverse individuals and populations, from the earliest stages of the translational pipeline to the final mile where the patient benefits.”
                                             - Ruth O'Hara, PhD

The CTSA fosters an innovative and collaborative workforce focused on identifying, optimizing, evaluating, and then transferring relevant health discoveries to patients and the community. Over the next seven years, the CTSA team aims to support not only a greater number of researchers at Stanford, but also support and leverage the significant excellence of Departments, Centers and institutes at Stanford, promoting additional impactful partnerships, and by extension, improving the lives of many more patients in the Bay Area and around the nation and the world. In addition, the new grant will implement wide-ranging Stanford partnerships with Kaiser Permanente and the University of Hawaii.

The newly awarded CTSA builds upon the excellence and productivity of the previous Stanford CTSA Awards, and it also represents the essence of team science, with multiple investigators working together to bring this NIH award to Stanford. Drs. Manisha Desai and Dean Felsher joined Dr. O’Hara’s CTSA leadership team along with Executive Director, Raj Prasad; Drs. David Magnus and Mildred Cho lead the CTSAs Bioethics core, while Drs. Steve Goodman, John Borghi and Mario Malicki head up Stanford CTSA’s efforts on enhancing rigor and reproducibility in science. Drs. Lisa Goldman Rosas, Anisha Patel and Bonnie Halpern-Felsher are forging the CTSA’s community engagement efforts, while Dr. Ken Mahaffey leads the CTSA’s Clinical Research and Clinical Trial enterprise, along with Jennifer Brown and Dr. Aruna Subramanian. Drs. VJ Periyokoil, Karl Sylvester, Mary Chen and Grant Wells drive the CTSA’s lifespan approach, bridging clinical and translational research from childhood to late life.  The CTSA also emphasizes the critical as MPIs role of Data Science in these endeavors, with Dr. Manisha Desai leading this effort through the CTSA’s Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Research Design (BERD) program. Dr. Tina Hernandez Boussard leads the CTSA’s optimization of Artificial Intelligence for achieving clinical trial diversity and effectiveness, while Drs. David Rehkopf and Mitchell Lunn focus on utilizing large, real-world data for fueling our clinical and translational enterprise. The innovative core of the CTSA is led by Drs. Kevin Grimes and Josh Makower, with an emphasis in the new CTSA on health policy. 

A key emphasis of the CTSA is to train the next generation of clinical and translational science, research, and educational investigators. In addition to the newly awarded CTSA UM1 award, Drs. Steven Asch and Eleni Linos led the renewal of the CTSA $7M, K12 award, which provides in-house training and mentorship to junior faculty starting their careers in clinical, translational and science of translation research.

Additional critical contributors to our CTSA efforts include Drs. Ravi Dhurjati, Kiran Kocherlakota, and Patricia Moussatche, and Maya Berdichesky, Katherine Connors, Jessica Meyer, Marilyn Dion, and Peg Tsao. The CTSA has an extensive internal and external advisory board of experts within and outside the institution to guide the CTSA over the next seven years and beyond. 

In addition to her positions at Stanford, Dr. O’Hara serves as national co-chair of the NIH CTSA Program Steering Committee. In this role, she works alongside fellow co-chair Michael Kurilla, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Division of Clinical Innovation at NCATS, to provide leadership and guidance to the consortium of 64 CTSA hubs at academic medical institutions across the country.

The CTSA Program is overseen by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) at the NIH. The grant number for Stanford medicine’s award is 1UM1TR004921-01. For more information about the CTSA program, visit med.stanford.edu/spectrum.html.

Stanford Medicine hosted a celebration of the grant award on October 21, 2024, which was attended by School of Medicine Dean Lloyd Minor, President and CEO of Stanford Health Care David Entwistle, and President and CEO of Stanford Medicine Children's Health and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital Paul King.