NIH Awards $29M to Renew Scripps Translational Science Institute

Eric Topol, Scripps Translational Science Institute,Scripps Health, TSRI,

[Corrected 10/21/13, 3:45 pm to show Topol sought grant after arriving in San Diego.] Federal funding for the Scripps Translational Science Institute, which cardiologist Eric Topol won after he came to San Diego seven years ago as the chief academic officer of Scripps Health and a professor of genomics at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI), is being renewed.

The institute, which began in 2008 with $20 million in Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) funding, will get $29 million over the next five years, according to a joint statement issued today by Scripps Health and TSRI. The increased size of the award reflects the institute’s expanding focus on wireless health and drug discovery.

“We are thrilled to have the NIH [National Institutes of Health] support us in our ambitious efforts to transform the future of medicine by focusing on genomics, wireless technology, and bioinformatics,” Topol, the institute’s director, says in the statement. Topol left the Cleveland Clinic to join Scripps in 2006, when the National Institutes of Health (NIH) started the CTSA program. Topol subsequently applied for the grant that resulted in the formation of the Scripps Translational Science Institute, where he is director.

The federal program was established in 2006 as a way to realize the promise of “personalized medicine” by combining academic and clinical research in genomic medicine in regional centers throughout the United States. Scripps says it is the only one of 61 centers in the consortium that is not part of a university. As my colleague Luke Timmerman has noted, the term “personalized medicine” has fallen out of favor since then, and practitioners vary in their preference for “individualized” or “precision” medicine.

The concept remains the same, however, as scientists and physicians advance the use of genomic sequencing, proteomics, and other tools to tailor treatments for individual patients.

Institutions funded through the Clinical and Translational Science Awards program work to transform the local, regional, and national environment to increase the efficiency and speed of clinical and translational research across the country.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.