Clinical and Translational Research Center

For 30 years, the General Clinical Research Center (GCRC) at UT Southwestern Medical Center provided a highly successful platform for translational research. GCRC investigators made major contributions to the therapeutic advancement of numerous commonly used drugs, including statins, 5-reductase inhibitors, and calcium supplements. In 2007, the GCRC was incorporated into the Clinical and Translational Research Center (CTRC), which greatly expanded the resources and facilities available to support clinical research. The major components of the CTRC are shown in the following figure.

The CTRC is a streamlined, consolidated, and centralized institutional and investigational resource. It assists investigators in all stages of protocol development and implementation.

The CTRC is an institutional resource for clinical and translational research available to UT Southwestern faculty physicians, residents, and fellows; medical and graduate students; and faculty and students from the Center for Translational Medicine's partnering institutions who wish to perform clinical research that requires a controlled environment for their investigations while supporting the safe and ethical conduct of clinical research and enhancing the quality of the research experience for study participants.

The Inpatient Clinic represents the facility that previously was the GCRC. Because of increased outpatient research at UT Southwestern, multiple outpatient clinics are now available to translational researchers.

The CTRC has recently been expanded to include Population Resources including the Dallas Heart Study and a Multiethnic Biobank. To make the CTRC more accessible to UT Southwestern investigators, a CTRC Laboratory has been added that provides phlebotomy services, processing of sample, and banking of body fluids, cells, and DNA and RNA.

The CTRC interacts with other Center for Translational Medicine programs as part of the latter’s efforts to provide the crucial infrastructure necessary for medical scientists to discover and apply new diagnostics and therapeutics for the detection, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease and effective therapies.

SUBMISSION OF CTRC PROTOCOLS

Protocols that have been approved by the UT Southwestern Institutional Review Board (IRB) can be considered by the CTRC under the following circumstances: the CTRC is listed as a site of research; the CTRC has the resources required by the study; the protocol meets the scientific quality required by the CTRC’s protocol review committee; the investigator will review the protocol with CTRC staff; and the investigator signs a CTRC agreement form.

Initiation of protocol review should begin submission of the protocol to:

Amit Gode
CTRC Manager
amit.gode@utsouthwestern.edu

and

Scott Grundy, M.D., Ph.D.
CTRC director
scott.grundy@utsouthwestern.edu

If you have questions about the submission process or CTRC policy please submit them by email to Amit Gode and CC Scott Grundy. You should receive a response within 24 hours.