NIH Building a Local Clinical Research Network?

On Friday I attended an exciting meeting at National Institutes of Health (NIH) exploring the possibility of building a local clinical trials network.  The NIH leadership wanted to explore the interest of regional healthcare research leaders, from Virginia (UVA and VCU), DC (Georgetown, MedStar, GW, Childrens, Howard, USUHS/Walter Reed), Baltimore (Hopkins, U of MD, MedStar) to Philadelphia (HUP and CHOP).  I was very pleased that MedStar was 'at the table' with these other great medical research organizations.

The day started out with Francis Collins (NIH Director) welcoming us and setting the stage of possibilities.  Then John Gallin (Chief Scientific Officer) and James Gilman (CEO of the Clin Center at NIH) explained how the NIH hospital, the largest hospital in the U.S. dedicated to research, has enormous resources that could potentially be shared with regional investigators.  Furthermore, the NIH could facilitate other types of peer-to-peer research organizational collaboration.

Then we heard about the challenges for building a clinical research network from Rob Califf, the former FDA Commissioner (who currently spends half his time as Vice Chancellor for Health Data Science at Duke and half his time at Google spin-off Verily Life Science) which set the stage for a robust discussion of 'what is possible together.'

At the end of the day, we all agreed that there is potential for such a regional network and committed to continue to work on it together.









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