Translational Science Core

Clinical research and scientific progress often go hand in hand with interdisciplinary research and technological advances. Without a support infrastructure that provides specific technologies and goal-specific expertise, it would be challenging to accomplish the targeted goal.

The current biomedical revolution, manifested by the ever-increasing speed of technological innovations and interdisciplinary nature of medicine, means that an individual researcher can no longer afford and master all state‐of‐the‐art techniques. Marshall University has an active research community in translational and basic sciences and has procured several sources of external funding. Furthermore, research activities have grown rapidly over the last few years, especially in obesity-related disorders. Most of the research in this area is conducted by individual researchers and there is a growing need for a core facility that can provide cutting-edge technologies and other research-relevant expertise in an affordable manner. As a result, we have established a “Translational Science Core” which facilitates obesity and obesity-related disorder research in both basic and clinical sciences by providing translational research consultation services. These services include patient de-identified data collection, patient sample collection, research design and protocol development for patient sample collection, analytics of translational data, and publication assistance.

By implementing the Translational Science Core, the Appalachian Center for Cellular Transport in Obesity Related Disorder (ACCORD) aims to provide researchers with access to a full range of services to facilitate successful identification and recruitment of patients for basic, translational, and clinical research studies in obesity and obesity-related disorders.

As shown in the Workflow diagram below, the Translational Science Core identifies and coordinates the recruitment of participants through clinical informatics, assists with research design, procures human samples, helps in clinical data collection, assists in IRB submission, sets forth quality assurance and regulatory compliance, and publication. It also provides biostatistics help in the interpretation of research results related to clinical measures for basic research as well as clinical pathology analysis. The Translational Science Core further establishes a data repository of the collected data (collected by the Core only) and makes it available to the relevant or interested investigators. The establishment of the Translational Science Core certainly fosters a collaborative research environment that is crucial for competitive interdisciplinary science and is an integral part of future grant proposals by investigators at Marshall University. Lastly, Master of Science Students in Clinical and Translational Sciences are encouraged to participate in the Translational Science Core to further their education in this area.