Institute for Integration of Medicine & Science: A Partnership to Improve Health

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Project Summary-Abstract South-Central Texas is home to San Antonio and Austin, both among the nation’s fastest growing cities. San Antonio, the gateway to South Texas, is the 7th largest city and the largest minority- majority Hispanic/Latino city in the US, whereas Austin is 11th largest. The region also includes many rural counties and several on the US-Mexico border. Given our demographics and rapid growth, our area foreshadows future challenges facing US healthcare, underscoring the national applicability of solutions devised by our hub. In 2006, UT Health Science Center San Antonio established the Institute for Integration of Medicine & Science (IIMS) as the academic home for translational research initiatives, training the translational science workforce, formalizing key strategic partnerships, and creating a community of scholars within a learning healthcare system. Building upon our optimized clinical and translational research infrastructure, IIMS now proposes a 4th cycle of CTSA support in response to PAR-21-293. Our hub seeks to be exceptional in solving clinical and translational science (CTS) roadblocks, translating discoveries into reduced disparities and improved healthcare outcomes across our multi-cultural population. We strive to make our vision a reality through robust strategies for supporting CTS across institutional partners and collaborating organizations, catalyzing successes for transdisciplinary research teams, and implementing programs that produce a creative, collaborative, and culturally diverse translational science workforce. We will achieve our goals through the strategic deployment of resources and expertise developed during 3 cycles of CTSA funding. Our proposal leverages optimized strengths across the spectrum of clinical and translational research to establish the capacity and infrastructure required for high-impact CTS programs. Thus, IIMS will pivot from the study of specific targets/diseases (i.e., clinical translational research) to the discovery of generalizable principles that apply to many targets/diseases (CTS), addressing rate-limiting steps and transforming translation from an empirical process into a predictive science. This guiding tenet is embedded within each Element and Module of this proposal, as well as across our pipeline of training and workforce development programs. We posit that synergies across hub partners will yield CTS innovations and contribute meaningfully to the National CTSA Consortium. Our over-arching Specific Aims are: 1. Catalyze the acceleration of CTS discovery and health disparities impact within a vibrant academic home synergistically integrated with our strategic partners and actively engaged with our diverse communities 2. Capitalize on our extraordinary Hispanic and military/veteran population base to diversify and enhance our interdisciplinary clinical and translational science workforce 3. Implement innovative strategies for evaluation and continuous improvement across all IIMS programs 4. Focus strategically on dissemination and implementation of evidence-based CTS advances with high potential for advancing health equity, both regionally and across the National CTSA Consortium