Having presented this past Wednesday’s Research Update Seminar titled “Making grants go further with Shared Resources,” Lou asked me to be a guest blogger this week and try to recap my talk.
Although unable to match Lou’s humor at the kickoff for the series on 9/14, (“When Weiners tweet, it does not end well”) I will try my best to at least be informative. I recognize that I may be preaching to the choir for the most part but I would like to emphasize a number of points I touched on in the presentation and some that I did not.
The Clinical Translational and Science Award (CTSA) that GUMC shares with a consortium of Washington, DC, area institutions has expanded our ability to offer state-of-the-art shared resources. The Translation Technologies and Resources component of the CTSA, which I co-direct with John Massari from Howard, greatly expands the resources available to basic, translational and clinical scientists at Georgetown, Howard, MedStar Health and the VA.
In addition we work closely with the other CTSA in town (Childrens National Medical Center) to offer technologies not available here at Lombardi, such as NextGen sequencing and genome-wide methylation analyses (contact GESR’s Dave Goerlitz for more info).
Shared Resources are regularly developing new approaches that are not yet offered as services. If you want to do something that is not listed, it may well be under development or, if widely applicable, could be developed. Just contact the SR manager. For example, in addition to the analyses mentioned above, GESR will shortly offer genome-wide and targeted siRNA synthetic lethal screening and TCSR will offer Dr. Schlegel’s cell culture technique for primary tumors and normal tissues as a service.
The new Nontherapeutic Recruitment Shared Resource (NTRSR) offers patient recruitment services for nontherapeutic human trials, meaning that investigators will simply budget for the service and will no longer need to hire their own full-time recruiters.
I also mentioned last week several new institutional funding mechanisms that could be utilized to support SR services. These include pilot ($25K) and collaborative ($100K) grants from the CTSA in which it is key is to emphasize a bona fide cross-institutional collaboration. The TTR component of the CTSA will shortly offer a small number of $10-20K awards for Shared Resource use and the development of new technologies within Shared Resources. Investigators and Shared Resources themselves could submit applications–an RFA will be posted soon.
If you want to learn more, there will be an open house symposium on the TTR this Tuesday, 9/27 at 12:30 pm at Howard University. Please feel free to join if you can — lunch will be served.
Finally, I can’t tell you how many times I have gone through PubMed to pull out Georgetown Lombardi Publications and realize that significant portions of the work were done in a Shared Resource that was not acknowledged. I have been as guilty of this as anyone. So I would like to remind everyone to appropriately acknowledge Shared Resource support in their publications and to provide Shared Resource Administration with the citations. Without this we cannot “claim” the resource was used in a particular paper. This has important implications for us when we seek CCSG or CTSA support.
Keep doing great science and have a wonderful week.
Howay the lads (look it up!)