Yale students, trainees, and faculty from across the medical campus attended the third annual All Scholar Day Retreat sponsored by YCCI on April 1st at the Anlyan Center.
Following a poster session, Christopher P. Austin, MD, director of the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), spoke to attendees on the role of NCATS in catalyzing translational innovation. “Translation is a team sport,” Austin said in his presentation, which stressed the need for collaboration, both from programs within the National Institutes of Health and with external institutions, in order to speed the development of new treatments.
The number of new drugs approved by the FDA per billion spent on research and development has halved roughly every nine years since 1950, Austin said. NCATS’ mission is to bring together methods, technologies, and tools to tangibly improve human health across a wide range of diseases. Examples of translational problems requiring a team approach include predictive toxicology, the efficacy of data interoperability, clinical trial networks, EHRs for research and adaptive clinical trial designs. “NCATS has just begun to transform itself and its programs to benefit patients,” said Austin.
Richard Flavell, PhD, FRS, founding chair of the Department of Immunobiology, presented on the role of inflammasomes in health, microbrial imbalance, and disease. Flavell explained research conducted by immunobiologists at Yale and other institutions that elucidates how altered microbiota in the gut is implicated in the pathogenesis of diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, obesity, inflammatory-induced cancer, and other diseases. This research sheds light on how diet, gut bacteria, and inflammation interact with one’s genotype in a cycle that leads to a wide variety of systemic diseases.
Other presenters included Ellen Hoffman, MD, associate research scientist at the Yale Child Study Center, and a trainee in the Investigative Medicine Program, who presented her research on zebrafish to examine neuropathways in autism; Serene Chen, a student at Yale School of Medicine in the TL1 program, who spent a year working on Variation in Recovery: Role of Gender on Outcomes of Young AMI Patients (VIRGO), a study examining heart disease in women aged 55 and under; and Meagan Moore, MD, PhD, postdoctoral fellow in internal medicine (pulmonary and critical care), who presented research on the role of the protein receptor Plexin C1 in pulmonary fibrosis.