The Office of Clinical Partnerships at ASU
Building Partnerships in Research and Education
The Office of Clinical Partnerships serves as a link between Arizona State University and the Biodesign Institute to various industrial and clinical partners in the community. It was created to help ASU researchers strengthen and expand connections to biomedical institutions in Arizona. The Office of Clinical Partnerships assists in the development of collaborations with clinical institutions through: (1) development of institutional agreements or memorandum of understanding, (2) establishment of seed grant funds, (3) joint faculty appointments, (4) shared graduate students and (5) shared educational programs.
The seed grant funding supports interdisciplinary and translational research projects that involve joint studies between ASU faculty and clinical faculty. The funds allow researchers to explore and test the feasibility of new and exciting medical areas or technologies. These funds enable the researchers to acquire pilot data that can then be used in their submissions for federal grant research funds. Currently, a seed grant program is set up between ASU and the Mayo Clinic, and we have funded 12 proposals at approximately $40,000 each.
Joint faculty appointments provide another opportunity for ASU to partner with the clinical community. It allows both ASU and its clinical institutions to hire more faculty members at a lower cost to each institution and to incrementally augment the development of a strong research engine. It also allows provides a mechanism for outside clinical faculty members to use ASU’s research infrastructure for grant submission and administration. In addition, joint faculty appointments allow ASU to increase research faculty and research dollars at the University, improve ranking by research dollars, and increase funds generated by indirects. The University would be responsible for providing grant office support, animal facilities, statistical support, study design, analysis, etc. The clinical partner would be responsible for providing facilities and staff for more clinical-based studies, imaging, pharmaceutical trials, clinical trials, etc. The academic appointment is through ASU and the hire is assigned to a specific academic department. Grants will come through ASU. Indirects will be credited to the University with the appropriate amount being apportioned to the clinical partner to support the clinical component.
Shared educational programs allow for increased enrollment, clinical training for students, shared space (whether by leasing or exchange), multidisciplinary instruction and capitalizing on the diversity of strengths of ASU and its clinical partners.
The Office of Clinical Partnerships acts to implement some of the design imperatives of the New American University, including Intellectual Fusion, Social Embeddedness, and Global Engagement through its linkages between the University and the Biomedical community in the Phoenix metropolitan area.
Working together to get answers:
In bringing scientists and clinicians together, an environment that fosters collaboration and innovation is created. This purposeful convergence of different scientific disciplines allows development of exciting new ways to partner basic discoveries in the lab with applications in the clinical world at the patient’s bedside. The Office of Clinical Partnerships works to bring scientists and clinicians from many disciplines together to work on use-inspired research. Innovative solutions occur through different kinds of collaborative research. In Interdisciplinary Research, an integrated analysis is used to determine comprehensive multidimensional approaches to prevention, diagnosis and treatment.
In Translational Research, linkages between theory and practice are investigated to make our most exciting research discoveries, an underlying piece of our latest clinical treatment.
Alliances for solutions:
The Office of Clinical Partnerships brings together clinical and investigative interests and strengths in a collaborative framework for biomedical research and development. The major objectives are to simplify the process of making new research collaborations, making it easier for ASU researchers to find clinical collaborators, and to direct clinical researchers to their counterpart at ASU. This will combine the medical community with the basic science community. This also has the added advantage of helping us to link more tightly our interdisciplinary initiatives across departments, across colleges, across our campuses.
ASU’s translational research component:
Outside community linkages:
Next steps: Implementation
