The USC School of Social Work is the nation's first school of social work to provide leadership in developing a clinical and translational research institute anticipated to join a national consortium supported by the National Institutes of Health. Together with the Keck School of Medicine, the Viterbi School of Engineering, the Leonard Davis School of Gerontology and the USC schools of dentistry and pharmacy, the School of Social Work is collaborating in the effort to transform how research is conducted – ultimately enabling promising new treatments to be brought more quickly and efficiently to patients. The NIH awarded the USC interdisciplinary effort a $150,000 Clinical and Translational Science Planning Grant last fall.

The consortium is part of a new priority at the NIH to change and integrate the approach to medical research, enabling researchers to advance basic research discoveries to clinical care more rapidly. To date, 12 academic health centers have received the awards. Another 52, including USC, have received planning grants to help them prepare applications to join the consortium. USC will submit its full proposal to the NIH in January 2008.

Translational science has emerged as a solution to an alarming problem – reports have discovered that a 20-year gap exists between knowledge generated from clinical research and the utilization of that knowledge on the front line of physical and mental health care. Translational science refers to the steps taken to bring new detection or diagnostic methods, or preventive or treatment interventions, from the laboratory to the clinic for use benefiting patients.

Training mental health scientists in translational research is critical. Social workers already provide the majority of mental health services to people in specialty mental health care settings as well as primary health care settings in the United States. The school has numerous experts in clinical and translational research and many nationally known specialists in mental health, as well as the Hamovitch Center for Science in the Human Services – its own research institute founded in 1982. The school's faculty is among the three most highly funded social work faculties in the nation.

"With national prominence in both research and practice, the USC Social of Work is ideally poised to help bridge the gap between research discovery and accessibility to patients," says Dean Marilyn Flynn. "This collaboration is a natural extension of our longstanding interdisciplinary focus."

Nearly 100 faculty members from the Health Sciences campus, Childrens Hospital Los Angeles and the University Park campus, as well as faculty from the City of Hope are involved in planning the new institute. Kathleen Ell, the Ernest P. Larson Professor of Poverty, Ethnicity, and Health, is spearheading the school's involvement and has been leading a team focused on developing the community exchange/interaction core of the proposed institute.

Ultimately, USC's Institute for Clinical and Translational Science – which was in development before the NIH issued the planning grant – will serve as a real academic home for the field, promoting bench-to-bedside and bedside-to-community translation with an emphasis on improving the health of high-density, urban, multicultural populations.