Temple and Fox Chase partner on research and education

Another boon for both institutions will be the collaboration on the newly created Institute for Translational Medicine, which also includes Geisinger Medical Center in Danville, Pa. Increasingly, medical research today is interdisciplinary and translational, requiring teams of researchers from many disciplines to apply basic research findings to patient care and treatment.

The institute will cut across disciplines and institutions by establishing an infrastructure to support clinical studies, form research teams, integrate community clinics into research and create new community outreach programs. To spur research collaborations, Temple and Fox Chase will jointly fund pilot projects for teams of investigators in the area of clinical and translational science.

“Collectively, we serve one of the most diverse patient populations in our nation, and together, we are uniquely poised to make significant contributions to translational research discoveries of the future,” Coico said.

Temple was awarded the National Institutes of Health Clinical and Translational Science Planning Grant in 2006. Support from this grant allowed the development of the master’s program in Clinical Research and Translational Sciences, as well as the training and education of faculty in translational science research. The School of Medicine aims to become a designated NIH Institutional Clinical and Translational Research Center, which will exponentially fortify the research venture.

Fox Chase Cancer Center is one of the leading freestanding cancer research and treatment centers in the United States. Founded in 1904 in Philadelphia as the nation’s first cancer hospital, Fox Chase became one of the first institutions to be designated a National Cancer Institute Comprehensive Cancer Center in 1974. Today, Fox Chase conducts a broad array of nationally competitive basic, translational and clinical research, with special programs in cancer prevention, detection and treatment, as well as community outreach.

With the launch of the Keystone Programs for Collaborative Discovery in early 2008, Fox Chase is committing significant intellectual and other resources to the pursuit of team-based science. In this approach to research, self-assembled teams of investigators across the spectrum of medical science disciplines join forces to address a significant question in cancer.

Temple’s research centers concentrate investigations in the following areas: cardiovascular disease; neurovirology; substance abuse; obesity and diabetes; cancer and molecular biology; thrombosis and pulmonary disease; and health disparities. The school’s research enterprise currently has more than $47 million in annual expenditures, and it projects continued growth at a rate of 5 percent to 10 percent per year.