NIH Grants Boston University CTSI $41 Million to Speed Lab Discoveries Into Treatments

The National Institutes of Health has awarded Boston University’s Clinical & Translational Science Institute $41 million in new funding, a seven-year commitment from the NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences that will underwrite the institute’s efforts to convert laboratory discoveries into therapies, devices, and diagnostic tools that reach real patients. The award, announced by Boston University, is part of NCATS’ Clinical and Translational Science Awards Program, a national network designed to accelerate the movement of scientific knowledge from the bench to the bedside. When combined with two companion grants—a training grant for predoctoral students and an award supporting early-career physician-scientists—the total NIH investment in the institute’s next funding cycle reaches $50 million.

Founded in 2008, the CTSI is a partnership between Boston University and the Boston Medical Center Health System, which includes the university’s primary teaching hospital. Under the new award, the Veterans Affairs Boston Healthcare System, a longtime collaborator, will formally join the institute’s leadership. The institute’s founding primary investigator, David Center, who is also BU’s associate provost for translational research, describes the vision in straightforward terms: bringing new discoveries to the communities the institute serves, from patients and scientists to students. Center, a clinician at Boston Medical Center and the Gordon and Ruth Snider Professor of Pulmonary Medicine at the BU medical school, says the institute has always aimed to start with education and end with products that improve health and cure disease.

The technical machinery behind that ambition is considerable. The CTSI provides research resources and funding, training and mentoring programs, access to core facilities and data sources, and structured community engagement. Its leaders say a driving theme for the next seven years will be what they call science without walls—a deliberate effort to dissolve disciplinary and institutional barriers. Megan Bair-Merritt, Boston Medical Center Health System’s chief scientific officer, a CTSI director, and a BU Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine professor of pediatrics, frames the institute as a forum for bringing people together across disciplines to tackle tenacious problems. The ultimate goal, she argues, is improving the health of communities, and the best way to achieve that is to incorporate a range of voices and perspectives.

The institute’s track record offers quantitative evidence of its impact. CTSI funding has led to more than 1,700 publications, and its support for 24 affinity research collaboratives—which assemble investigators from multiple disciplines around common goals such as Alzheimer’s disease or women’s health—has helped spark close to $300 million in outside funding. At least 20 patents have resulted from CTSI-backed projects, which have also informed more than 500 policy documents and clinical guidelines from 45 countries and intergovernmental organizations. Center, speaking as a hospital-based researcher, notes that university- and hospital-based scientists want to do research that is meaningful for the patients they serve.

Perhaps the clearest illustration of the institute’s catalytic power is the lung disease research now advancing at Boston University. Nearly two decades ago, the CTSI provided crucial early funding and support to researchers building a stem cell biobank for use by BU investigators. That initial project evolved into the Center for Regenerative Medicine of BU and BMC, a world-leading stem cell and regenerative medicine hub now pioneering treatments for a host of conditions, including neurodegenerative, cardiovascular, and gastrointestinal disorders, as well as lung disease. Today, those researchers are testing ways to use a patient’s own cells in new therapies and collaborating with a global biopharma company to identify new drug targets—work that would likely never have matured without the institute’s early-stage investment.

The new grant will allow the CTSI to expand its reach in several directions. Planned initiatives include new workforce development programs, team science activities such as research jams, and closer collaborations with BU’s artificial intelligence, bioinformatics, and data science experts. The integration of computational expertise with clinical research reflects a broader trend in translational science, where machine learning and large-scale data analysis increasingly identify drug targets, predict disease trajectories, and match patients to trials. Institute leaders say the expansion is designed to help researchers who might otherwise unknowingly replicate capabilities or resources the CTSI already has mastered.

The formal inclusion of the VA Boston Healthcare System in the institute’s leadership adds substantial research infrastructure. Because the CTSI now spans three major research institutions—BU, BMC, and the VA—it can connect researchers with data from some of the nation’s biggest health-focused investigations. These include the BU-led Framingham Heart Study, a multigenerational cohort that has shaped cardiovascular medicine for decades, and the Million Veteran Program, a study of genes, military experience, lifestyle, and health, and one of the largest projects of its kind in the world. Terence M. Keane, the VA Boston Healthcare System’s associate chief of staff for research and a director at the National Center for PTSD, is now part of the CTSI leadership team.

Keane argues that bringing the enormous intellectual talent and resources of a comprehensive university to bear on the problems of war veterans may be the greatest benefit of the VA’s involvement in the CTSI. He adds that VA Boston’s resources, from its clinical programs to its hundreds of researchers, are also an asset to BU and BMC. Collaborating with VA investigators to frame important questions for the entire US population, he says, has been and will continue to be a true advantage for BU investigators across schools and departments. Providing new faculty with opportunities to collaborate across the BU, BMC, and VA Boston research communities, he notes, will propel the careers of young investigators while enhancing national and international reputation.

Among the rising researchers who have benefited from past CTSI support is Lou Awad, a BU Sargent College of Health & Rehabilitation Sciences associate professor of physical therapy. As a young investigator, he won multiple pilot grants and a career development award from the institute. Awad says the CTSI helped catalyze his academic career through grant awards, grant writing mentorship, and clinical research services, and that his very first three faculty grants came from the institute. His laboratory, based on BU’s Charles River Campus, added clinical expertise and capabilities to its studies with the institute’s help. His own research focuses on using robotic devices to help people recover from stroke, an area where engineering and rehabilitation medicine intersect.

Today, Awad is paying that support forward. He is building a CTSI team that will help researchers teach patients and community members how to use new medical devices and gadgets, overcoming barriers that can sometimes stifle the at-home success of new healthcare technologies. The challenge is a familiar one in translational science: a device that performs well in a supervised clinical setting may fail in daily life if users lack training, confidence, or technical support. By addressing that gap, the team aims to ensure that innovations survive the transition from clinic to home. Awad encourages his colleagues to explore how the institute can augment and accelerate their work, noting that its mission is to make researchers better and that odds are strong any individual project or lab is unknowingly duplicating a capability the CTSI already has mastered. With the new seven-year award, the institute’s leaders say the work of turning scientific discoveries into lifesaving treatments and tools will continue, now with the VA’s resources woven into the effort.

Subject of Research: NIH funding for the Boston University Clinical & Translational Science Institute

Article Title: NIH awards Boston University Clinical & Translational science institute $41 million in new funding

Article References: NIH awards Boston University Clinical & Translational science institute $41 million in new funding. (n.d.). Original publication

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Keywords: NIH, NCATS, Boston University, translational research, CTSI, Boston Medical Center, VA Boston Healthcare System, clinical research, stem cell therapy, research funding, awards, Boston