Northwestern receives $55 million to advance health research

• Funding will enable discoveries for diverse populations to go from lab to clinical care settings
• Will translate scientific research to treatments, therapies that can improve patients’ quality of life
• Institute will infuse implementation-science methods into research to make public health improvements more scalable
• ‘Clinical and translational research does not happen in a bubble’

CHICAGO — The Northwestern University Clinical and Translational Sciences (NUCATS) Institute has received $55 million in National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding to accelerate the development, evaluation and implementation of improved health care interventions.

The seven-year award is the largest current research grant at Northwestern and extends a legacy of NIH funding that began when the institute launched in 2008. 

The NUCATS Institute helps translate novel discoveries from the laboratory to routine clinical care, leading to treatments and therapies that can extend and improve the quality of life for patients. This is a process that remains slow, complex and labor intensive. NUCATS provides scientists at its four health system partners (Northwestern; Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago and its Stanley Manne Children’s Research Institute; Shirley Ryan AbilityLab; and Northwestern Medicine) with consultative resources and expertise to accelerate how quickly transformative scientific discoveries reach patients and communities. 

“Clinical and translational research does not happen in a bubble. It requires dedicated investigators and members of the public to advance human health,” said Dr. Richard D’Aquila, associate vice president of research and senior associate dean for clinical and translational research at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “With generous support from the NIH and Northwestern, we will continue to work alongside our exceptional coalition of community and health system partners to help build a better framework for innovating and implementing discoveries in ever more inclusive ways.”

NUCATS is led by principal investigators D’Aquila; Sara Becker, the Alice Hamilton Professor of Psychiatry; and Dr. Clyde Yancy, chief of cardiology at Feinberg. 

“The collection of extraordinary faculty and staff who will manage this iteration of NUCATS is a testament to the transformational mindsets held by the institute’s leadership,” said Dr. Eric G. Neilson, vice president for medical affairs and Lewis Landsberg Dean of Feinberg. “This funding allows us to further advance our mission to improve human health by investigating the mechanisms that drive the translation of discoveries toward real-world treatments.”

NUCATS and the multiple-principal investigator team will develop, evaluate and disseminate more effective health interventions to more patients more quickly following these three specific aims: 

• Include: Cultivate a culture of inclusive excellence as they expand their workforce, partnerships and research participants, including those historically underrepresented in biomedical science, to optimize the benefits of translation for all;
• Innovate: Support innovation to accelerate and transform translation; and 
• Implement: Infuse implementation-science methods into clinical research.

The grant is awarded by the NIH’s Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) Program, which supports a national network of medical institutions that speed the translation of research discoveries into improved care. The institute also is positioned to infuse implementation-science methods into work across the translational continuum to improve public health and meet the needs of all.

“Implementation science can help us accelerate and catalyze the uptake of evidence-based practice into routine clinical care,” said Becker, director of Northwestern’s Center for Dissemination and Implementation Science. “Northwestern is a national leader in this space. The NUCATS Institute will become a model CTSA hub that advances inclusive, innovative and implementable solutions to the evolving challenges that impede scalable public health progress.”

Yancy’s research in cardiology and health disparities addresses optimal treatment of heart failure. In a seminal contribution, he revealed the predominant cause of heart failure among Black people is hypertension rather than the ischemic heart disease, which is most often the commonly accepted cause in non-Black patients. His groundbreaking work informed how to optimize treatment strategies for Black patients, including the first-ever FDA-approved therapy specifically for Black patients.

“Diversity in the biomedical workforce is more than representativeness, it is rather about excellence, diverse ideas and unique strategies that will enrich our ability to provide care for the entire population,” said Yancy, vice dean for diversity and inclusion at Feinberg. “By addressing inequities with intentionality, we are positioned to understand and then overcome persistent systemic limitations that hurt those underrepresented and underserved populations and, in turn, impair best health for everyone. We commit to responsibly and courageously leading the path to inclusive excellence and belonging.”

Since launching in 2008, the NUCATS has supported more than 3,500 academic publications and annually facilitates more than $1 million in competitive pilot research projects that seed new NIH applications.