The Institute for Translational Medicine

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ABSTRACT ITM 3.0: ADVANCING HEALTH TOWARD HEALTH EQUITY THROUGHOUT METROPOLITAN CHICAGO The University of Chicago – Rush University Institute for Translational Medicine (ITM) was created in 2007 to assemble, integrate, and create the intellectual, administrative, and physical resources required to catalyze research and research training in Clinical and Translational Science. We have trained university scientists and health care providers as well as stakeholders from concerned communities to work together to determine the biological, behavioral, and social determinants of disease; to develop and test interventions directed toward those mechanisms; and to achieve these goals in a way that is rigorous, efficient, ethical, respectful of, and responsive to our communities’ priorities and values. The ITM has capitalized on outstanding intellectual and physical resources throughout UChicago, Rush, and ITM affiliate institutions – Loyola University Chicago, NorthShore University HealthSystem, Advocate Aurora Health Care, and Illinois Institute of Technology – and on substantial multi-institutional investments to build the sustainable infrastructure for a transformative, energetic, and self-improving home for clinical and translational research. Now, we pursue a bold guiding vision for “ITM 3.0” – that reversing the adverse health consequences of structural racism requires accounting for and mitigating the social, environmental, behavioral, and psychological factors (the entire lived experience, which we will call the “sociome”) through which structural racism impairs health. Focus on the sociome is critical because: 1) sociome factors interact with human biology to exacerbate or cause disease and injury, and 2) illness of any origin can compound the negative effects of adverse sociome factors. Since both sociome and biological systems, and their interactions, determine health, our CTSA hub must provide investigators, trainees, and stakeholders with the resources and knowledge to account for and address health disruptors throughout both systems. Our strategy to implement this vision is to create new training mechanisms, research platforms, communications channels, and safeguards against harm to ensure that all ITM investigators and institutions approach health problems with a wider-angle sociome lens in an ethical way. Then, our scientific, institutional, and community stakeholders can together design, test, and disseminate biological and/or sociome-directed interventions at the levels of individual, community, and society to improve mutually defined health concerns. ITM 3.0 will work hand-in-hand with partners throughout Chicagoland and the nation, combining academic rigor with community wisdom to conceptualize, develop and deploy innovative, just, and ethical interventions/practices to achieve our common goal, and so lessen the health impact of structural racism.