UNC grant will help hasten medical research

CHAPEL HILL -- It took doctors more than 12 years to figure out that Karen Le Clair's cleft palate was harming her hearing.

Her parents had to find dentists, plastic surgeons and ear, nose and throat specialists all on their own, and the doctors didn't talk to each other.

That was in Detroit in the 1950s and '60s. Twelve years ago, at age 48, Le Clair moved to Chapel Hill, to gain access to some of the best medical care in the nation.

After nearly a dozen surgeries in her lifetime, Le Clair knows the benefit of having teams of specialists within arm's reach.

"When I was a kid, that wasn't around," she said.

Thanks to a $61 million grant announced Thursday by the National Institutes of Health, UNC-Chapel Hill will be working to make sure families across North Carolina can tap into that kind of care.

The money will support the UNC Translational and Clinical Sciences Institute, or TraCS, which circulates medical knowledge among patients, doctors and researchers so that they all learn from one another.

"The initiative will bridge science and clinical practice and speed up the movement of innovations from the laboratory to the bedside and the community," said Dr. William L. Roper, dean of the UNC School of Medicine.

The institute will partner with the university's Area Health Education Centers to open community research units in Wake County, the Coastal Plain region and Wilmington, to complement a pilot program in Greensboro.

"If somebody wants to be part of a study, they don't need to come to Chapel Hill," said Dr. Giselle Corbie-Smith, director of community engagement for TRaCS.

The research units will collect clinical data and opinions from patients, transfer them to UNC-CH for researchers to analyze and test the latest treatments on patients who might benefit.

"I had tears in my eyes when I heard this was coming through," said Le Clair, who serves on the TraCS Community Advisory Board and works as a support specialist for disabled children with the Family Support Network of North Carolina.

The pilot program, the Greensboro Health Disparities Collaborative, is polling patients on whether doctors should prescribe treatment on the basis of genetic differences among the races in the wake of a controversial study showing that certain drugs worked differently in blacks and whites.

"We're not going to impose research on a community, but we're actually going to empower," said Terence Muhammad, chairman of the Greensboro collaborative. "The people that we're going to serve, we want them to have a say in all this."

The Respectful Prescribing Study in Greensboro is just an example of the give-and-take that will come with the NIH grant. Dr. Paul Watkins, a UNC medical school professor who led the NIH grant application process, said an advisory board will decide which medical ailments will command the attention of the program.

"We will focus on the areas where we're farthest along and most advanced," Watkins said, adding that TraCS will be dispensing current research not only from UNC but also from 38 other grantee institutions across the nation, including Duke University. "UNC will lead the entire network in this type of activity of partnering with communities."