July 10, 2010
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New Graduate Division Program Targets Aspiring Translational Researchers

By Robin Hindery

Allopartis Biotechnologies entrepreneur Charles Emrich, chief scientific officer and co-founder, at the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3) Garage, located at the UCSF Mission Bay campus.

A new UCSF program aims to inspire and train the next generation of researchers to help bridge the gap between laboratory discoveries and novel treatments for human diseases.

Since June, the Graduate Education in Medical Science (GEMS) Training Program has been offering courses, lab rotations and research support to students in UCSF’s biomedical sciences programs, with the goal of educating them in medical sciences and exposing them to ongoing clinical research.

Many details are still being finalized, but program leaders hope to award participants either a certificate or a master’s degree in translational research, conferred by the Graduate Division, upon completion of the program. UCSF already offers a two-year Master’s Degree Program in Clinical and Translational Research to students in its four professional schools.

“A significant percentage of UCSF graduate students expressed in their applications some desire to contribute to advancing human health,” said GEMS program director Louis Reichardt, PhD, a UCSF professor of physiology. “I think there’s a lot of potential here to make UCSF even more attractive to such students.”

Sparking Innovative Collaborations

Reichardt and other supporters of the GEMS program hope it will spark innovative collaborations between basic science researchers and clinical researchers, thereby accelerating the conversion of scientific breakthroughs into patient care.

“Although the main objective of academic health centers such as UCSF should be to get information out of the research labs and into the clinics, and vice versa, we have few concrete mechanisms for achieving this goal,” said Regis Kelly, PhD, director of the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3) and a member of the GEMS core leadership team. “The creation of a GEMS training program is, therefore, a welcome and much-needed addition to UCSF’s capacity to achieve its primary goal.”

UCSF Chancellor Susan Desmond-Hellmann, MD, MPH, described translational medicine as central to the University’s mission and to health care reform in general. And given her experience at companies like Bristol-Myers Squibb and Genentech, the topic of translational science is particularly close to the chancellor’s own set of professional interests. While working at Genentech, she was deeply involved in drug research and development, clinical trials, and the process of gaining FDA approval.

Matching Scholars for Fruitful Study

To help promote collaborations between GEMS scholars and clinical research groups, a mentorship matching committee – composed of senior clinical scientists with a broad knowledge of UCSF – will help identify potentially fruitful pairings, Reichardt said. Those could include, for instance, a bioengineering student and a radiologist studying imaging methods for early detection of brain tumors, he said.

The GEMS program is being funded initially through a grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) through its Med into Grad Initiative. UCSF is one of 23 schools this year to receive up to $700,000 over four years to develop programs that bring clinical medicine into the graduate school curriculum.

“It is important for PhD biomedical scientists to gain an understanding of the real-life medical problems faced by physicians in practice,” said William Galey, PhD, director of the HHMI’s graduate education and medical research training programs. “Too few biomedical scientists appreciate how their research can help change the practice of medicine or public health.”

GEMS will also receive $300,000 in funding over four years from the UCSF School of Medicine, Reichardt said.

Flexible Framework to Encourage Research

The program’s framework will be flexible enough to accommodate students at various phases of their PhD study and with different levels of commitment to a medical sciences education, Reichardt said. For example, each year, the GEMS leadership committee will offer partial research support for a select group of students – including students who have not previously participated in GEMS program activities – whose theses include a translational research component, Reichardt said.

Reichardt and his colleagues are currently working to spread the word among current and prospective PhD students, and have launched a program website.

The first of the program’s two introductory courses, Introduction to Human Biology and Medicine, organized by GEMS co-director and UCSF virologist Donald Ganem, MD, has already begun. The second course, Infection, Immunity and Inflammation, is scheduled to start in late August.

Deborah Grady, MD, MPH, associate dean for clinical and translational research in the UCSF School of Medicine, Tejal Desai, PhD, professor in the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences, and Marc Shuman, MD, professor of medicine and clinical director of QB3, will serve as co-directors of the program alongside Ganem.

Photo by Susan Merrell