Dr. Eva K. Lee, associate professor and director of the Center for Operations Research in Medicine and Healthcare in the Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) at Georgia Institute of Technology, is part of a research team that has been awarded more than $31 million dollars over a five year period by Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA), a consortium funded by the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR), a part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

This grant, one of the largest NIH grants in Georgia history, was awarded to the Atlanta Clinical and Translational Science Institute (Atlanta-CTSI) a partnership of Atlanta academic, research and healthcare institutes that will focus on accelerating the translation of laboratory discoveries into healthcare innovations for patients so that new treatments can be developed more efficiently and delivered more quickly to patients.

The partnership will be led by Emory University, along with the Georgia Institute of Technology, Morehouse School of Medicine, and Children's Healthcare of Atlanta. Dr. David S. Stephens MD, executive associate dean for research at Emory University's School of Medicine, serves as principal investigator of the grant.

The goals of Atlanta-CTSI mirror those of the national CTSA consortium -- to create new and innovative programs that accelerate discovery, engage communities in clinical research and the development of new scientific knowledge; train and develop interdisciplinary investigative teams; and create new research tools and information technologies that improve human health.

Dr. Lee serves as co-director of the Biomedical Informatics Program (BIP) on this grant. BIP will transform clinical and translational research in the Atlanta-CTSI by building an integrated biomedical informatics system that links all of the Clinical Interaction Network sites.

"A highly innovative aspect of this program involves the design and implementation of a light-weight yet powerful leap-frog software infrastructure based on code generation and optimization that connects distributed clinical and translational data,* said Lee.

This software infrastructure will support the Atlanta community of clinical and translational researchers by providing smooth and secured communications among the different electronic medical record systems at such places as Emory, Grady, MSM, VA Hospital, CHOA, Kaiser-GA, and other affiliated community based practices. In addition, the infrastructure will enhance the current translational bioinformatics capabilities by linking them to one another and to the clinical data for integrative analysis. This integration will support the rapid translation of research advances to the medical professional and larger community, and is critical for Atlanta-CTSI community engagement and outreach. Other BIP efforts include advances in bioinformatics, clinical informatics, education, training and outreach.

Emory, Georgia Tech, Morehouse School of Medicine, and Children's Healthcare will each contribute strengths to the partnership that will help create unique and valuable synergies. Emory is a national leader in healthcare and biomedical research. Georgia Tech's School of Industrial and Systems Engineering is a national leader in systems engineering and the application of innovative operations research to medicine and health care solutions. Morehouse School of Medicine is a leading historically black institution that brings ethnic diversity to the biomedical research community, addresses health disparities through successful community engagement and serves as a pipeline for training minority investigators.

By partnering with Children's, the ACTSI also will create a new and innovative pediatric clinical and translational research center that builds on the established relationship of Emory, Morehouse School of Medicine, and Children's Healthcare of Atlanta and the shared healthcare they provide and adds new research relationships with Georgia Tech in bioinformatics.