California Biomedical Industry - California Healthcare Institute

Buchanan, PI. This is one of 55 NIHClinical and Translational ScienceAwards funded nationwide. Theconsortium shares a common vision toreduce the time it takes for laboratorydiscoveries to become treatments forpatients and to engage communitiesin clinical research efforts. It also isfulfilling the critical need to train a newgeneration of clinical researchers. Thegoal of the USC center is to transformhow clinical and translational researchis conducted, ultimately enablingresearchers to provide new treatmentsmore efficiently and quickly topatients. The program is committedto providing new methods and tools tomeet the opportunities and challengesin translational research. The centerwill support the development of newtranslational tools and resources andmatch them to translational projects toaccelerate improvements in health. USChas partnered with leading academic,clinical and community organizations incentral Los Angeles to establish a centerthat will improve health in this diverseurban environment and, in doing so,gain knowledge that we can share withothers to improve health in urbansettings and megacities across the globe.The science of medicare reformFunded under the NIH Director’sFive Themes program solicitation andled by principal investigator DanaGoldman, this research collaborationwill design and conduct Medicarerelatedresearch, policy simulation, andwelfare analysis. A multidisciplinaryteam spanning four institutions atthe forefront of health economics andpolicy research — Stanford University,USC, RAND Corporation, and the UCBerkeley — will focus on solutionsto ensure Medicare continues itslegacy of success. Specific goals areto: develop optimization models ofplan choice in the Medicare Part Dmarket, understand competition in theMedicare Part D marketplace, examinethe consequences of formulary andbenefit design for utilization, health,and spending, apply comparativeeffectiveness analysis to identify clinicalareas for potential savings in Medicareand build a research network to supportMedicare-related research and policy.Improving prescription practicesThe three-year, $11 million grant willutilize psychology and behavioraleconomics to improve physicians’prescribing practices, particularly howto dissuade physicians from prescribingantibiotics unnecessarily. The grantwill be led by Dr. Jason Doctor of theUSC School of Pharmacy; Doctor’sgroup aims to improve prescriptionpractices for common acute respiratoryinfections, which include bronchitisand influenza. Aggressive antibioticprescribing is a major public healthconcern for its suspected link to thespread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.Targeting cancer therapiesUltrasensitive Nanolasers forEpigenetics Investigations. AndreaArmani, PI. One of 52 projects fundednationally, this work is funded underthe NIH Director’s New Innovatorprogram that is designed specificallyto support unusually creative newinvestigators with highly innovativeresearch ideas at an early stage of theircareer. The objective of this project isto develop a new nanolaser capableof detecting and quantifying DNAmethylation. This proposed researchwill develop a completely novelsensor platform with unprecedentedcapabilities for detecting epigeneticchanges, and applies it to early ovariancancer detection and monitoring, andto study the fundamental underlyingmechanisms of cancer progression.California Biomedical Industry 2011 Report | 75