Health care centers, universities announce new partnership to ...

BATON ROUGE -- Eight Louisiana medical centers and schools announced Thursday that they will be partnering to bolster research, clinical testing and the training of doctors studying chronic diseases in under-served populations. The program, known as the Louisiana Clinical and Translational Science Center or LACATS, is being funded by a $20 million grant from the National Institutes of Health and aims to allow the institutions to share resources to produce new treatments and preventative measures.

?This will allow us to move discoveries from the bench to the clinic more quickly and from there to the community,? said William Cefalu, associate executive director of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge. The research center is taking a lead role in implementing the program.

Over the course of the five-year grant the medical centers involved in the partnership will focus on health issues such as diabetes, obesity, heart disease and cancer. By pooling resources, the different institutes will be able to take advantage of each other?s strengths. Getting a new drug or treatment approved is long and complicated process and each institution is better equipped to handle different aspects of that system, said Patrice Delafontaine, director of Tulane University?s Heart and Vascular institute.

?The LACATS program capitalizes on the strengths unique to each of these programs,? Delafontaine said.

Other institutions in the partnership include LSU?s public hospital in New Orleans, Xavier University, Children?s Hospital, LSU?s Baton Rouge campus, the system?s Health Care Services Division and the LSU Health Science Center in Shreveport.

Officials are hoping that the result will be getting treatments into clinical trials in the community more quickly. Once the programs reach that phase, the trials themselves may be conducted more quickly because researchers will have a larger pool of patients who may be interested in participating in the tests in health clinics, Cefalu said.

That pool will largely come from the state?s health clinics, which serve a large portion of the uninsured population. This will give those patients an opportunity to participate in the testing of new methods of treatments, Cefalu said.

In addition to funding the administration of the new system, which will work to standardize research policies among the institutions and coordinate their efforts, the money from the grant will also be used to hire faculty and doctors and help start pilot research programs.

A big push will include preventative measures and treatments to avoid medical problems for patients, officials said.

"We'll focus on discovering the triggers to there chronic diseases,? said Steven Heymsfield, executive director of Pennington.

Steve Nelson, dean of the school of medicine at LSU in New Orleans, said additional research will also serve to bolster the area?s economy.

?The knowledge created by medical research will be an economic engine that will create high-skill, high-wage jobs,? Nelson said.

Source: http://www.nola.com/health/index.ssf/2012/09/health_care_centers_universiti.html

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