UCSD bets big on ‘bench-to-bedside’ research

The clamor of construction will soon get louder at UC San Diego, a school forever in growth mode. The university is preparing to build a $269 million center focused on one of the hottest areas of research, “translational medicine,” the quest to turn basic discoveries into treatments for human illness.

UC San Diego will break ground in January on the Altman Clinical and Translational Research Institute, a short distance from the Jacobs Medical Center, which is now rising on the Health System Campus. The buildings will be connected by a bridge that is meant to cultivate ties between people who are often strangers — basic and applied scientists.

Translational medicine — called “bench-to-bedside” by many scholars — is undergoing to boom locally and nationally as scientists try to accelerate efforts to treat everything from Parkinson’s disease to prostate cancer and ailing hearts.

The Scripps Translational Science Institute in La Jolla already has developed a genetic test that pre-empts the need for some cardiac catheterization. The nearby Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine is working in related areas, and was designed with an unusual amount of window space in hopes of getting scientists for different fields to collaborate more.

Construction of the new UC San Diego institute is being guided by David Brenner, dean of the School of Medicine and vice chancellor of health sciences. Brenner recently discussed the nature and future of translational medicine with U-T San Diego.

Q: I think there’s confusion over the word translational. What is this science really about?

A: Translational medicine is the relatively new concept that you can take observations and discoveries made in the laboratory and effectively and efficiently bring them into patient care. It used to take an incredibly long time because things done in research laboratories like those at UCSD and Salk and The Scripps Research Institute would be published, and that would be the end of them. Maybe a drug company would find something interesting in reading the literature. But there was no emphasis on the research investigators themselves being involved in that process. So the National Institutes of Health has made a major decision that it will encourage and provide support for translational research for scientists who make observations — usually in mice or some simple system — and see whether it is relevant to diseases in patients.