Jared Grantham, MD, had nearly everything he needed to embark on an important clinical study of polycystic kidney disease, a progressive, genetic disorder of the kidneys that can lead to kidney failure and death. The Harry Statland Professor of Nephrology at the University of Kansas School of Medicine lacked just one key necessity: adequate space suitable for working with patients in clinical studies.



“We had to beg and borrow to get space,” Grantham recalls. “For a long time, we were using whatever nooks and crannies we could find around KU Hospital.”

Everything changed when Grantham transferred his study to the General Clinical Research Center (GCRC), 900 square feet of research space dedicated to clinical research. “Now we have great research space, and we’re on the road to finding a treatment that could slow the progress of this disease.”

The GCRC is a boon to the clinical investigators at KU Medical Center, many of whom need better space and equipment to enhance their research efforts. KU Medical Center, which is committed to substantially expanding its research capacity, established the GCRC in 2005 because clinical research is the final and perhaps most important step in the medical research process.

That process begins with the study of cells, advances to investigations of specific diseases and eventually leads to research involving animals. But that’s not the end of the road. “It’s the clinical research piece – determining how drugs and medical devices and therapies affect disease in humans – that ultimately results in getting new treatments into the hands of medical practitioners,” explains Richard J. Barohn, MD, GCRC Program Director, the Gertrude and Dewey Ziegler Professor of Neurology, and chair of KUMC’s Department of Neurology.

Today, the GCRC is home to scores of clinical trials and studies with patients, representing roughly half of all the clinical research performed at KUMC. In April, for example, 30 active GCRC clinical studies were underway on a wide variety of diseases and health conditions, from Alzheimer’s and ALS to cancer and kidney disease.

The value of the GCRC, according to clinical investigators who utilize it, goes well beyond the basics of providing free research space and equipment. It is a complete clinical research support system. The center serves well-established researchers like Grantham, who have sufficient funding but inadequate space. It also gives less-experienced, junior investigators a broader range of assistance and support they need to become accomplished researchers. This includes helping them design

strong, short-term, preliminary studies that may evolve into well- funded, long-term research projects.

Additionally, scientists who use the GCRC have access to medical personnel who are trained to collect the kind of reliable, baseline data that newer researchers must produce to secure formal funding.

Consider the brain aging study by Jeffrey Burns, MD, director of the Alzheimer and Memory Program at KU Medical Center. He needed not only space, but nurses capable of processing, over the course of a few hours, 13 different blood samples for each patient. “It was a very complicated process, and I could not have completed my study without GCRC’s skilled nursing staff,” Burns says. The preliminary data collected during the brain aging study enabled Burns to secure three NIH grants for Alzheimer’s research.

NIH recently awarded KU Medical Center a three-year, $6+ million grant to expand the GCRC, essentially tripling the research center’s annual budget. As a result, the GCRC will accommodate even more studies. NIH funding also will allow the GCRC to award five $20,000 pilot research grants per year to junior faculty members who have exciting research ideas, but require staff or other resources beyond what is available at the GCRC. Another benefit of the NIH grant is the introduction of new research-mentoring programs for medical students, an innovation that will hopefully nurture a new generation of research scientists.

Over the next several years, the GCRC intends to morph into a regional clinical and translational center for all area research and health care institutions. Ensuring that the best prevention approaches, diagnostic tools, drugs and other treatments identified during clinical studies are adopted into medical practice is a priority of NIH, which has announced its intention to fund 60 translational centers nationwide over the next five years.

The GCRC already has received an NIH planning grant for this regional center, and with it has developed the Heartland Institute for Clinical and Translational Research (HICTR) and named Barohn director. If KU Medical Center is awarded a much larger grant from NIH to fund this center over the next five to 10 years, the GCRC will be folded into the HICTR.

“What we’re doing today at the GCRC would be magnified ten-fold with the HICTR,” Barohn explains. There would be more space, more equipment, more research studies, more training – more opportunities for KU Medical Center scientists to play a major role in moving medical science forward.

Regional collaboration also would be an essential component of the HICTR. Clinical investigators throughout the community could use the HICTR for interdisciplinary and cross-institutional work that would inevitably accelerate the medical research process. Such collaboration would facilitate the rapid transfer of clinical findings to hospitals and other medical facilities throughout the region. +