Harvard Clinical Nutrition Research Center

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DESCRIPTION, OVERALL (provided by applicant): In this competing renewal application, we propose an established institutional resource, the Harvard Clinical Nutrition Research Center, principally based at the Massachusetts General Hospital of the Harvard Medical School (HMS) in close collaboration with other Harvard teaching hospitals (CH, BIDMC, B&W), the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and other academic programs in Boston (Boston University and Tufts USDA). The overall goal of this HCNRC is to provide high quality research which will yield insights into the cause and pathogenesis of nutrition-related diseases and lead to improved therapeutic approaches to nutrition care. Nutrition as a discipline within Harvard has much more visibility because of the 1) creation of two endowed Chairs in Nutrition at HMS and HSPH, 2) a NIH-funded Nutrition Training Grant at HSPH and a pending T32 at HMS, and 3) the creation of a Division of Nutrition at HMS as a major initiative to provide more nutrition education in the medical school curriculum and HMS physicians and 4) the HCNRC. The major specific aims are: 1) to provide research in basic areas of biology relevant to problems in clinical nutrition; 2) to promote the study of clinical nutrition and application of knowledge derived there from within the HMS, its teaching hospitals and HSPH communities; 3) to promote interactions among scientists and clinical investigators to show relevance in advancing the science of clinical nutrition; and 4) to attract "basic" investigators into the domain of clinical nutrition to promote an environment and mechanism to develop new investigator-initiated research. These aims will be facilitated through the functioning of several HCNRC biomedical core resources; (a) Genomics; (b) Morphology/Tissue Culture/Immunology and (c) Mass Spectrometry. A pilot/feasibility program in support of the above aims has been enormously successful with a special emphasis on proposals to explore the extension of work emerging from laboratories of basic scientists in a manner relevant to the understanding and resolution of clinical nutrition problems. Here the research proposed extends from the level of the gene to treating of integrated, complex patients. Additionally, an education enrichment program is proposed including seminars, short-courses, colloquia, tutorials and formal didactic classroom presentations in the immediate academic/hospital area and to support training in clinical investigation.