NIH Funds Virginia’s Translational Health Research Institute
The integrated Translational Health Research Institute of Virginia (iTHRIV) has received a five-year grant of nearly $23 million from the National Institutes of Health to advance innovative ideas from the point of discovery to implementation in clinical practice and population health.
“iTHRIV” includes the University of Virginia (UVA), Inova Health System, Virginia Tech and Carilion Clinic as partners, with the Center for Open Science and UVA’s Licensing & Ventures Group as affiliates. It is the first cross-state effort in Virginia to integrate broad clinical and translational research resources and processes for a transformative benefit. The overarching goal of iTHRIV is to support research that benefits Virginia’s rural and urban populations by optimizing the use of data science.
The NIH Clinical and Translational Science Awards program, supported by the NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, provides resources for researchers across the statewide consortium, trains the next generation of biomedical and health scientists and collaborates with community partners to improve health. The national Clinical and Translational Science Awards network includes approximately 60 institutions around the country that are recognized as elite clinical and translational research institutions.
iTHRIV brings together different areas of expertise, including translational research, clinical research and data science, and its multi-principal investigator leadership reflects this design, including UVA’s Karen C. Johnston, M.D., an expert in clinical trials and a neurologist who specializes in caring for patients with acute stroke; and Donald E. Brown, a data scientist and systems engineer who was the founding director of the UVA Data Sciences Institute.
Leadership from Virginia Tech and Carilion includes Warren Bickel, co-director of Virginia Tech-Carilion’s Center for Transformative Research in Health Behaviors; Paul Skolnik, M.D. chair of the Virginia Tech-Carilion School of Medicine and Carilion’s Department of Internal Medicine; Michael J. Friedlander, Virginia Tech’s vice president for health sciences and technology and executive director of the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at Virginia Tech-Carilion ; Audra Van Wart, assistant vice president for health sciences education at Virginia Tech; and Kathy Hosig, director of the Virginia Tech Center for Public Health Practice and Research in the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine.
At Inova, Dr. John Niederhuber, M.D., CEO of the Genomics and Bioinformatics Research Institute, leads the program.
“We’re delighted to be part of this transformative initiative in translational and clinical research,” Virginia Tech President Tim Sands said in a prepared statement. “This partnership advances our biomedical health and sciences enterprise, expands our ongoing collaboration with Carilion Clinic, and strengthens our connections with colleagues across the commonwealth at the University of Virginia and Inova in a way that will benefit the health of all Virginians.”
