Tuesday, January 23, 2007
Contact: Julie McKeel
Duke Clinical Research Institute

In October 2006, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSAs) to 12 educational institutions nationwide to develop institutes to speed the translation of discoveries made in the laboratory into therapies that improve human health.  Duke University Medical Center received $52.7 million from the NIH to support establishment of the Duke Translational Medicine Institute (DTMI).

According to NIH Director Elias Zerhouni, M.D., the cooperation among these translational institutes will result in discoveries that will improve medical care by applying new scientific advances to real world practice.

The NIH program is designed to support the spectrum of research from the laboratory bench to implementation in public health practice.  Ultimately, the hope is that the CTSAs will result in improved health outcomes for the American population.

Wasting no time in this initiative, Stephen George, Ph.D., chief of the biostatistics division in the Duke Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, announced internal grant funds available through the NIH’s CTSA grant to Duke to support research projects in biostatistical methodology applicable to translational science. These awards were available to all full-time faculty members at Duke University. 

The applications were to be relevant to either the "bench to bedside" or the "trials to population" translational block of research. The grant would provide sufficient protected time for recipients to develop research grant applications to external agencies.  Each award would also cover partial salary and benefits for the recipient for one year.

Applications were reviewed by a panel of experts consisting of several senior members of the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics as well as several external reviewers chosen for their expertise in biostatistics or translational medicine.

The awards were announced this week, and are effective for one year starting February 1, 2007. The grants are eligible, in a competitive renewal process, for one additional year. A progress report is required on at the end of the first year and at the end of each subsequent year, if any.

The awardees and their projects are:

	Huiman Xie Barnhart, PhD Associate Professor DUMC Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Duke Clinical Research Institute Assessing agreement with repeated and multivariate data
	Cliburn Chan, MD, PhD Assistant Research Professor DUMC Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Center for Computational Immunology Development of a platform for exploratory and statistical analysis of multi-color flow cytometry data
	Sheng Feng, PhD Assistant Research Professor DUMC Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Center for Computational Immunology Modeling higher order linkage disequilibrium patterns using the HapMap data
	Sin-Ho Jung , PhD Professor DUMC Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Duke Comprehensive Cancer Center An efficient multiple testing procedure and sample size calculation for microarrays
	Min (Annie) Lin, PhD Assistant Professor DUMC Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Duke Clinical Research Institute Translating pharmacogenetic data of drug response into clinical practice with a joint model for longitudinal and time-to-event outcomes
	Wenqin (Wendy) Pan, PhD Assistant Research Professor DUMC Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Duke Clinical Research Institute Statistical methods for analyzing medical cost data under dependent censoring