ANN ARBOR – The University of Michigan has received a $58 million five-year grant to help researchers turn their best ideas and discoveries into tests, treatments, care innovations and cures through training, funding and central research services.

The grant is from the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences through its Clinical and Translational Science Awards Program. It provides for an up to five-year new dose of funding for the Michigan Institute for Clinical & Health Research, or MICHR, contingent on the availability of future U.S. congressional appropriations. More than 50 other universities nationwide are supported through the Clinical and Translational Science Awards Program.

“The new funding means more chances to translate U-M ideas into knowledge and breakthroughs that can eventually help patients and the general public,” said MICHR director George Mashour. “Without community participation in all phases of research, many of those ideas simply can’t go very far.”

Many U-M researchers have gotten a share of MICHR’s past grants to directly fund their research—$21 million in all. Those dollars enable them to generate early results that can help them win grants to move their ideas forward. To see just a few examples, visit www.michr.umich.edu/stories-of-impact.

MICHR provides services to collect and mine the massive amounts of data that research generates, and to give researchers access to clinical services like blood testing and genetic tests for research volunteers. The new funding will enhance these capabilities. It will also fund the use of mathematical techniques to study large-scale research networks, with U-M’s Institute for Research in Innovation and Science and Institute for Social Research.

MICHR also plays a key upstream role in training researchers and their staff in modern research techniques, and the many steps it takes to find and win funding for their work and to get a promising new idea out to the “real world.”

“The new grant will allow us to expand some of our most successful training programs in translational research, and develop new ones,” said Vicki Ellingrod, associate director of MICHR and leader of its education team.

Such programs—which reach more than 1,200 faculty, staff and students annually—include education and mentoring workshops, webinars and seminars as well as more formal training programs that award master’s degrees and certifications.

“Perhaps what is most exciting about our new grant is that we will now be able to work more directly with patients, research participants and groups within the community, and learn how to guide research in collaboration with our MICHR scholars,” Ellingrod said.

By creating these partnerships from the beginning, MICHR will be able to better impact how U-M researchers directly translate their findings into practice and community health.

The NIH has awarded CTSA Program grants since 2006 with the goal of improving the translational research process to get more treatments to more patients more quickly. Mashour, who serves as executive director of translational research in the U-M Office of Research and associate dean for clinical and translational research in the Medical School, was recently appointed to serve on the NCATS CTSA Program national steering committee.