Obesity conference “big step forward” for ICTS
Organizers of a conference on obesity designed to stimulate discussion across research disciplines called the conference “a big step forward” toward the development of grant proposals for clinical and translational science. More than 80 persons, mainly faculty from the UI, participated in the conference held April 8 at the Iowa Memorial Union. The conference was co-sponsored by the UI Institute for Clinical and Translational Science (ICTS) and the UI Institute for Biomedical Imaging.
“We wanted researchers from many colleges and many disciplines to get together with the goal of stimulating discussion that will lead to grant proposals,” said Gary Hunninghake, MD, director of the ICTS. “It’s clear we achieved that goal. This conference is the beginning of what I am convinced will be some dynamic and exciting research collaborations.”
The conference focused on six topics in obesity: nutrition, behavior and exercise, community/health disparity, epidemiology, pediatrics, and imaging/biology. Topic facilitators gave an overview of some of the facets of their topic. During breakout sessions which followed, faculty shared their perspectives on the issues and then collectively considered gaps in knowledge that might be addressed by a multi-disciplinary research collaboration.
According to Peg Nopoulos, MD, Director of the Translational Technologies and Resources section of the ICTS and organizer of the conference, those sessions helped connect researchers who, in many cases, were unaware of the work each other was doing.
“These are exactly the types of interactions the Institute wants to foster as we sponsor seminars and conferences,” she said. “By funding our Institute last fall, the National Institutes of Health sent a very strong message that interdisciplinary work done to improve health is the direction NIH funding is headed.”
Hunninghake said two products of the conference will be a Wiki site where leaders from the conference will post potential new research interactions and projects, and a list of patient cohorts so that people involved in clinical and translational science will know which populations are already participating in research.
The UI Institute for Clinical and Translational Science was established in 2006 by the Board of Regents, State of Iowa. Last September, the NIH announced the UI was being awarded one of the first 24 Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA). As a grantee, the UI became part of a national consortium that is transforming how clinical and translational research is conducted, ultimately enabling researchers to provide new treatments more efficiently and quickly to patients.
The consortium ultimately will link about 60 institutions together to energize the discipline of clinical and translational science. The CTSA program draws on NIH’s earlier initiatives to re-engineer the clinical research enterprise, one of the key objectives of the NIH Roadmap for Medical Research.