NIH Awards CTSI $2 Million to Advance UC Initiative

UCSF's Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) has been awarded $2 million to advance a biobanking project involving the five University of California campuses.

The goal of the project, Engaging University of California Stakeholders for Biorepository Research (EngageUC), is to develop an ethical, efficient and sustainable system for obtaining, processing and sharing biospecimens and data. It includes outpatient facilities at the UC medical center campuses – Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco.

This award by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), is a supplement to the five-year, $112 million renewal award (grant number UL1 TR000004) that UCSF’s CTSI received as part of the Clinical and Translational Science Award program in 2011.

“This is a very important project,” said Clay Johnston, MD, PhD, associate vice chancellor of research and director of CTSI at UCSF. “Not only does it deal with a critical issue about appropriate consent for biospecimens, a problem we’re much better able to address together, but it also builds on relationships across the UCs that we’ve been bridging more and more successfully recently through efforts such as UC BRAID.”
 
Read more at UCSF.edu