CTSA Ansible – April 10, 2020

THE SPOTLIGHT | WHAT’S NEW | GET INVOLVED | CONSORTIUM CORNER

When the Whole is More than the Sum of its Parts

Our CTSA Consortium resources, capabilities, expertise, and innovative thinking are critical in responding to the worst pandemic since HIV.

The fast-evolving nature of this crisis requires readily available and deployable capabilities throughout the country. As such, our Consortium stands strong and ready to work collaboratively in identifying resources, expertise and promising scientific advances for the prevention, diagnosis, treatment and follow up of patients with COVID-19.

To foster collaborations and sharing of resources (both virtual and physical) we developed a COVID-19 Discussion Forum (DF) where we are collecting and sharing pertinent and up-to-date information regarding activities, resources and clinical trials that are taking place throughout the Consortium and beyond. To access the COVID-19 DF and for information on how to contribute content, please Click Here. We look forward to learning more about relevant activities taking place at your hubs and help catalyze new opportunities to collaborate.

In addition, last week, NCATS issued a COVID-19 Notice Of Special Interest ( NOT-TR-20-011) to highlight the urgent need for research on the 2019 novel Coronavirus (COVID-19). Continue Reading

THE SPOTLIGHT

Announcing the Development of CM-PRISM

In response to comments received in the CMI 2.0 assessment, next year CLIC and NCATS will be launching a new Common Metrics Initiative (CMI) data submission tool called CM-PRISM.The use of the Clear Impact Scorecard has provided a foundation for hubs to work with the Results Based Accountability framework to gain insight on the performance of their metrics. As we transition to CMI 2.0, and begin to identify consortium-wide benchmarks and goals, we are transitioning to a new tool. NOTE: Hubs will continue to use Clear Impact Scorecard for their 2020 CMI data submissions.CM-PRISM is a REDCap instrument. REDCap has historically shown flexibility in its reporting capacity and many across the consortium are familiar with its functionality. We expect that this system will be fully implemented and functional for August 2021 CM data submissions.CLIC intends to request assistance from 10-15 pre-selected hubs to provide feedback on the user experience and to ensure that this new system not only meets the needs of the consortium but also facilitates data collection process. In the coming months CLIC will reach out to pre-identified pilot hubs to determine their interest in participation.

WHAT’S NEW

Don’t Forget to Cite your CTSA Program Hub Award!

As information is rapidly being disseminated about projects and activities surrounding COVID-19 and other research, we would like to remind our grantees that each publication, press release, or other document about research supported by an NIH award must include an acknowledgment of NIH award support and a disclaimer such as: “Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Center For Advancing Translational Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number (Insert Your Award Number Here). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.”

Notice of Special Interest (NOSI): Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) Program Applications to Address 2019 Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) Public Health Need

The National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) is issuing this Notice of Special Interest (NOSI) to highlight the urgent need for research on the 2019 novel Coronavirus (COVID-19). NCATS is particularly interested in projects focusing on the use of informatics solutions to diagnose cases and the use of CTSA-supported core resources (e.g., advanced scientific instruments, highly-specialized facilities, and regulatory expertise) to facilitate research on COVID-19 and advance the translation of research findings into diagnostics, therapeutics, and vaccines. NCATS is soliciting applications for Administrative Supplements to UL1, U01, and R21 awards (through PA-18-591), Collaborative Innovation Awards to U01 and R21 awards (through PAR-19-099 and PAR-19-100, respectively), and Competitive Revisions for UL1 awards for each of the non-administrative supplement awards (through PAR-19-337).

Notice of Special Interest (NOSI): Repurposing Existing Therapeutics to Address the 2019 Novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) (NOT-TR-20-012)

National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) is issuing this Notice of Special Interest (NOSI) to highlight the urgent need for research on the 2019 novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) and the disease it causes, i.e., “coronavirus disease 2019” (COVID-19). NCATS is particularly interested in projects that repurpose existing drugs or biologics (existing therapeutics) that have already begun or completed a Phase I clinical trial. NCATS is soliciting applications to PAR-17-465, PAR-18-462, and PAR-18-332.

Notice of Special Interest (NOSI): Administrative Supplements for Development of Training Modules in Genomic Medicine for Health Care Professionals (NOT-HG-20-020)

The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) announces the availability of funds to support the development and implementation of modules aimed at providing health care professionals with genomic medicine training. Genomic medicine topics include: clinical use of genomic data, genomic tests, analysis of clinical genomic data, pharmacogenomics, use of genomic information for preventive medicine, etc. Development of training materials and/or curriculum needs to be within the scope of the parent grant. Application budgets are limited to $125,000 total costs per year. Applicants can request a maximum of two years of support. NHGRI anticipates making two awards contingent upon funds available and the submission of a sufficient number of meritorious applications.

COVID-19 Resources and Guidance: Information You Need, When and Where You Need it

For up-to-date NIH COVID-19 information, including: InformationalVideos; Proposal Submission & Award Management Resources; Human Subjects & Clinical Trials Guidance; Animal Welfare;Frequently Asked Questionsregarding flexibilities for grantees and; Funding Opportunities, please visit:https://grants.nih.gov/policy/natural-disasters/corona-virus.htm.

Also, with information and funding opportunities quickly evolving during this pandemic, we want to make sure our Consortium has the most up-to-date and readily available information. We will post relevant funding opportunities and announcements in our monthly Ansible, but you can also find the latest opportunities that NCATS is participating in, by following this link:https://ncats.nih.gov/funding/open#notices.

Call to Action to the Tech Community on New Machine Readable COVID-19 Dataset

Researchers and leaders from the Allen Institute for AI, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), Microsoft, and the National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health released the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19) of scholarly literature about COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, and the Coronavirus group.

The White House has joined these institutions in issuing a call to action to the Nation’s artificial intelligence experts to develop new text and data mining techniques that can help the science community answer high-priority scientific questions related to COVID-19.

The CORD-19 resource is available on the Allen Institute’s SemanticScholar.org website and will continue to be updated as new research is published in archival services and peer-reviewed publications. Researchers should submit the text and data mining tools and insights they develop in response to this call to action via the Kaggle platform. Through Kaggle, a machine learning and data science community owned by Google Cloud, these tools will be openly available for researchers around the world.

National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C)

The COVID-19 global emergency raises many difficult questions, such as: who is infectious, who may need hospital care and at what level, what are the key risk factors, what are the best prognostic indicators, what are best practices for ethical resource allocation, and which drugs are the most viable candidates for patients.

To address these and many other questions, the National Center for Data to Health (CD2H) and NCATS are leading the creation of a national, centralized, secure portal for COVID-19 clinical data. This initiative is a partnership among several HHS agencies, the CTSA program, and the distributed clinical data networks PCORnet, OHDSI, ACT/i2b2, and TriNetX. To minimize the effort required by network partners, NCATS will accept data from multiple data models and transform them into a common analytic model. The cloud-based collaborative portal will allow for the development of machine learning and other informatics tools that require a large row-level dataset, and will be overseen by a data access committee. We believe this portal will provide additional assets needed to rapidly develop the analytics that clinical centers and physicians need now.