In a society where having more than one skill set is becoming more and more important, the Creighton University School of Medicine is blending two distinct but overlapping fields.
The School of Medicine has established an Office of Clinical and Translational Research.
“Translational research is putting a term to integrating basic science, and what they learn in the basic science laboratory, and then utilizing it in a clinical research way to test the hypotheses that have been developed inside the laboratories,” said Rowen Zetterman, the medical school dean. “So it’s really integrating basic science and clinical science together into one discipline so that they can test a variety of hypotheses.”
Zetterman said scientists studying basic sciences, which are fields like chemistry, biology, physiology and pharmacology, will often discover something in a laboratory or while working with animals and then want to test it on humans, which is the domain of clinical science.
He said the opposite is also true in which clinicians, while doing something like caring for a patient or performing an operation, will often observe something that can be explained by basic science.
“It’s really trying to merge both sides of clinical medicine together,” Zetterman said.
Devendra Agrawal, professor of medical microbiology and immunology, biomedical sciences and internal medicine, has been named the associate dean for the new office.
“I’m real excited about this opportunity,” Agrawal said. “My goal will be to establish the interdisciplinary programs … that can be applied to patient care.”
Zetterman said the new program will help facilitate communication between basic and clinical science, which, for the most part on Creighton’s campus, are on opposite sides of the North Freeway. Zetterman said the program also may help increase the number of graduate students in some programs.
“We [may] have somebody that wants to be a physician, but needs a very strong background in basic science,” Agrawal said. The new office will allow students to add more years to their educations so they can earn more degrees.
Agrawal said the office will be staffed by existing faculty members applying their existing expertise, though Zetterman said the office may attract new faculty who are interested in teaching overlapping fields. Zetterman also said the office will probably create new undergraduate and graduate courses, but those details haven’t been worked out yet.
“Since we’ve just really gotten off the ground, it’ll probably take us about 18 months to do that,” Zetterman said. “Secondly, if we’re going to develop new graduate programs, we’ll have to look at how the funding will go for that.”
Zetterman said offices like the new one at Creighton are common in top medical schools and some are even offering master’s degrees in translational research.
“Lots of schools are developing either specific areas and centers for translational research or they at least have the programs that they’re facilitating,” he said.
However, he said, the Creighton program wasn’t designed to model another school’s he said.
“It’s a Creighton program,” Zetterman said. “So it’s really been designed inside with some discussions with some of the faculty and myself.”
Zetterman said he thinks this is a good time for Creighton to be creating an office for translational research.
“I just think it’s an opportunity that was at the right time to step forward and begin to kind of put this out front and center so that everybody understood the importance of translational research and where it’s going in medicine,” he said.
Agrawal said he thinks it’s time at Creighton that we applied our existing potential.
“I always believe in innovation and change,” he said.