Pan-Harvard Program Launched to Catalyze Clinical Research
The Harvard Catalyst, a collaborative effort committed to harnessing the human, technological and fiscal resources of Harvard and its academic health care centers to reduce the burden of human illness, went live in September. The effort unites Harvard’s 10 schools and its 18 independent academic health centers. All members of the Harvard faculty and students—regardless of their institutional affiliations—have access to the resources of the Harvard Catalyst.
In May, Harvard received a five-year Clinical and Translational Science Award from the National Institutes of Health for $117.5 million, which is supplemented by an additional $75 million provided by the Harvard University Science and Engineering Committee, HMS, HSPC and Harvard-affiliated teaching hospitals, including BWH, MGH, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Children’s Hospital Boston and Dana–Farber Cancer Institute. This NIH grant, which established the Harvard Clinical and Translational Science Center, is administered through Harvard Medical School and forms the platform upon which the Harvard Catalyst is built.
Key elements for success already exist, such as the intellectual force, technologies and clinical expertise necessary to reduce the burden of human illness. What was missing is a systematic way for investigators from disparate disciplines and institutions to find each other and form teams, to gain open access to tools and technologies and to obtain seed funding to embark upon new areas of investigation. This demands a systematic effort to remove the barriers and obstacles to cross-institutional collaboration. A catalyst lowers the barriers to reaction and thus speeds a reaction that would normally have occurred at a much slower rate. Speeding the reduction of human illness is the only function of the Harvard Catalyst.
How will the Harvard Catalyst achieve its mission? Simply stated, it will bring faculty, postdoctoral fellows, clinical trainees and graduate students from affiliated institutions together to attack human illness. There is great enthusiasm among basic scientists—including biologists, engineers, chemists, and physicists—for new collaborative efforts to decipher the mechanisms of human disease, develop new diagnostics, and develop new strategies and agents to treat or prevent human illness. The barriers they face include a lack of understanding of diseases, inability to identify the most important scientific questions and lack of access to clinical collaborators. Likewise, researchers who conduct studies on individual patients or populations are eager to bring their most pressing clinical questions to the laboratory, but often do not know how to find scientific partners who would be interested and willing to collaborate. Once investigators find each other, they need access to relevant technologies; to human material; to patients and normal subjects; to expert help in areas such as biostatistics, biomedical informatics, genetics, and imaging; and to pilot funds to catalyze high-risk, high-impact projects.
In addition, this effort aims to build on existing strengths among the many institutions to nurture a new culture of academic and community partnership that will increase the relevance of research to the needs of the region.