Research Roundup
The North Carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences (NC TraCS) Institute, home of UNC’s NIH Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA), has received two important grant supplements. These Cooperative Agreement administrative supplements will enable investigators to complete processes and bioinformatics tools that have been in development for some time and to share them throughout the national consortium of 60 institutions charged with accelerating the pace of biomedical research.
The Dental Toolkit
The Dental Toolkit is a web-based, clinical and translational dental research system that will expand the ability of CTSA dental investigators to participate in multidisciplinary research projects. It will serve as a resource model across all dental CTSAs and beyond and permit dental researchers conducting clinical translational investigations, including community engagement projects, to produce comparable data across the network. The $300,000 grant supplement is for completing the program development and conducting a demonstration project.
The toolkit will help enable development of a wide range of dental network studies, including comparative effectiveness studies, and will be especially valuable for the study of less frequently occurring dental conditions. As a result, the toolkit should assist investigators in developing a better understanding of a variety of oral conditions, and their possible relationships to systemic conditions, and lead to new therapies that will improve the health of the public and reduce costs.
Not only will the toolkit provide a platform for collection of oral examination data, but it also will associate that exam data with medical, social, behavioral and health services data. The system also will provide tools for the collection, bar coding and archiving of biological samples. Investigators can easily create electronic case report forms customized to the type of study design and data collection scheme used. All components of the toolkit are fully compliant with established data security standards.
“The goal is to create common data collection protocols and standardized examination procedures available to dental investigators. These would make research results comparable across studies and foster community engagement projects that include practicing dentists and studies integrated with medicine,” explained Steven Offenbacher, D.D.S., Ph.D., who is leading the effort, along with James Beck, Ph.D. Offenbacher is director of the Center for the Oral and Systemic Diseases. Beck is assistant director of the Clinical and Translational Research Center, representing the School of Dentistry.
Development of the Dental Toolkit is a collaborative effort between UNC and CTSA counterparts at University of South Carolina, Mayo Clinic, Columbia University and the National Center for Research Resources at NIH. Offenbacher and Beck of UNC are ensuring communication between the project members, NCRR program staff and other dental CTSA programs.
Community Engagement Research
Community engagement is a key tenet of translational research. Thus, there is high demand for skills, knowledge, training and strategies to enhance participation in research addressing the needs of communities. Challenges persist for all parties involved: non-academics may find it difficult to formulate research questions, while academic investigators need help building effective academic-community research partnerships.
NC TraCS has received a $499,996 CTSA Administrative Supplement grant for a project designed to transform the way communities and academic investigators work together to investigate persistent health challenges and design solutions to address pressing health needs. Called “Community Engagement Consulting Models: Taking Them to Scale,” the project is a collaboration between NC TraCS; the Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention, a CDC-funded Prevention Research Center at UNC; and Vanderbilt University’s CTSA (VICTR).
The project builds on prior pilot work at both CTSAs done with American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) funding in 2010. NC TraCS and VICTR took different approaches to fostering community-engaged research. NC TraCS developed a “charrette” process which engages community and academic community-based participatory research (CBPR) experts in a structured process that responds to applications from community-academic partnerships. This process is in testing now to help accelerate research projects that may be early-stage, stalled, experiencing challenges or in need of a strengthened approach. VICTR has been piloting a Community Review Board process which provides a forum for community input into the design, implementation and dissemination of community-engaged research projects. Both sites hired community members to co-lead their supplement projects and recruited and developed a pool of community experts to assist in pilot activities.
The aims of the new supplement are to (1) provide information about the CBPR charrette and Community Review Board models through webinars to all interested CTSAs nationwide; (2) offer intensive, targeted technical assistance, coaching and guidance in these models to four partner CTSAs at the Universities of Alabama at Birmingham, Arkansas, Iowa and Morehouse-Emory; (3) develop a toolkit that provides information on how to replicate the models and disseminate through the CTSA network; and (4) improve upon and continue evaluation of the two models in use at our respective sites. The purpose is to provide CTSAs nationwide with two models for community engagement that incorporate best practices from which they can select to meet their individual needs.
Alexandra Lightfoot, Ed.D., is project director. She is joined by Christina Hardy, M.P.H., community research fellow/project manager; Molly De Marco, Ph.D., M.P.H., evaluation specialist; Alice Ammerman, Dr.P.H., R.D., Giselle Corbie-Smith, M.D., M.Sc., and Eugenia Eng, Dr.P.H., senior academic advisors; Bonnie Jones, M.S.W., M.S.P.H., research assistant; and 15 CBPR community expert consultants.
“With the support of this new grant, we look forward to refining and sharing the novel approaches we have developed over the last two years with other CTSA institutions at different stages along the community engagement continuum,” said Lightfoot.
