For a 14-year-old boy at the Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora, Thursday was a day of hope.
The boy, Tim, was born with cystic fibrosis. Last weekend, while his friends played outside, Tim was on the ninth floor of the medical research unit at Children’s Hospital getting lung treatments to help him breathe.
Tim and hundreds of other children in Colorado are fighting for their lives, volunteering in research studies to test new treatments that may lead to a cure of the deadly disease.
Thursday, the University of Colorado Denver announced that it had received a $76 million, five-year grant that could help reduce the time it takes for laboratory discoveries to become treatments.
The grant from the National Institutes of Health is the largest biomedical research and training award in the state’s history.
With the grant, a new organization, called the Colorado Clinical and Transitional Sciences Institute (CTSI) has been created to find cures and get them to patients in a better, quicker way.
The institute will combine and coordinate the efforts of research scientists, health care providers and representatives of UC Denver, Children’s Hospital, Denver Health, the Denver Veterans Affairs Medical Center, National Jewish Medical and Research Center, and Kaiser Permanente Colorado.
Dr. Ronald Sokol, a UC Denver School of Medicine physician who will direct CTSI, said that with the NIH grant has come “a big responsibility and a lofty charge, but we are up to the task.”
UC Denver officials said Thursday that exciting new treatments are already resulting from research underway.
For example, a new treatment for schizophrenia is being tested that was discovered in the laboratory of Dr. Robert Freedman, the chairman of psychiatry.
Freedman found that most people with schizophrenia are heavy smokers because it makes them feel better. Freedman developed a new drug treatment for schizophrenia using nicotine receptors in the brain as a target. The treatment is being tested and analyzed.
New gene chip technology can help find out whether individuals are prone to certain diseases, for which early intervention may be lifesaving.
The new institute will initially target health problems affecting rural Coloradans, American Indians, Latinos treated at Denver Health and residents of the San Luis Valley.
Howard Pankratz: 303-954-1939 or hpankratz@denverpost.com
Where the funds go
The new Colorado Clinical and Transitional Sciences Institute will fund:
•Programs to take discoveries out of the lab into the clinic, or “bench-to-bedside research.”
•Programs to take treatments from the clinics into communities statewide.
•Cutting-edge technologies to perform research more quickly.
•Programs to find out whether adult diseases start in childhood and what types of early intervention can be done.
•Computer technology so researchers can share databases.
•Training for future researchers.
