June 17, 2005

Translational research will be focus of Clinical Research Day

The third annual MGH Clinical Research Day will celebrate translational research — the critical process by which discoveries made in the laboratory are brought to the care and treatment of patients, and how information from patients and their families informs the work of basic researchers.

"Academic health centers today are facing the fundamental challenge of wedding the care of their patients to their powerful basic research engines," says William F. Crowley, Jr., MD, founder and director of the MGH Clinical Research Program. "Techniques to bring new knowledge from the bench to the bedside and to take what we learn from patients back to the laboratory are changing all the time, which gives investigators powerful new tools but also demands remarkable vision and flexibility."

The June 28 event will open at 8:30 am in the O'Keeffe Auditorium with a keynote speech by Jeffrey Drazen, MD, editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, who will call on his own research into asthma to illustrate "Lessons in Translational Research." After Drazen's talk, representatives from three award-winning MGH teams will present their research projects, followed by a poster session at 10:15 am under the Bulfinch Tent, featuring more than 200 clinical research projects.

At 11:30 am in the O'Keeffe Auditorium, a distinguished panel led by Nobel-prize-winner Philip Sharp, PhD, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will address "Can Academia and Industry Partner to Solve the First Translational Block?" Drazen and Crowley — along with David Altshuler MD, PhD, Daniel Podolsky, MD, and James Thrall, MD, all of the MGH — will join representatives of the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries to discuss ways to surmount the barriers that can stand in the way of clinical application.

"Here at the MGH, our clinical researchers have used advanced genetic and genomics techniques to rewrite the textbooks on Huntington's, ALS and Alzheimer's disease," Crowley says. "Today they are adopting even more complex techniques to address disorders influenced by many genes and to explore the intricate interactions of proteins. This continuing spirit of innovation in taking advantage of new knowledge will help us reach our goals of improving the diagnosis, treatment and ultimately prevention of human disease."