Enthusiasm for Clinical and Translational Research at Johns Hopkins

M ost health professionals who enter biomedical research come to the fi eld wanting to make a discovery that will improve the lives of their family, friends, and patients. However, understanding diseases and developing eff ective treatments and interventions is never easy and almost always takes longer than expected. At Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, there is a long tradition of discovery through clinical care and research. Trainees come to Johns Hopkins from every part of the United States and from around the world to begin their careers in research. As their research careers develop, they gradually narrow their focus on more specifi c questions or methodologies, making it easy to lose sight of the translational pathway. As the CTS editor recently discussed, there are a number of barriers to collaboration that are inherent in the structure of academic medical centers.1 Even though most scientists acknowledge the value of translational teams, it is true that, in the current research environment, rewards come more easily to individual investigators who focus primarily on discrete questions. Translational research is diffi cult because the pathway is long, and failures may occur at multiple points. Although creating comprehensive translational research teams may be a welcome challenge to some, others seem more comfortable with the approach of working with a smaller, more manageable research team. Translational research requires interaction with a complex regulatory environment and comfort with having less control of the entire process. Since its establishment in September 2007, our Center for Translational Sciences Awards (CTSA) program, Th e Johns Hopkins Institute for Clinical and Translational Research (ICTR), has strived to create an environment where research is engaging and rewarding and where investigators feel closely connected to a translational pathway. We will describe some of the ways we try to create an institutional environment that fosters a spirit of collaboration and translation among investigators and other members of the research community—to be, as we say in the ICTR motto, a place “where science and people connect.”