National Institutes of Health

Coordinated by Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences (RBHS), the New Jersey Alliance for Clinical and Translational Science (NJ ACTS) comprises a consortium with Rutgers and Princeton Universities (PU), NJ Institute for Technology (NJIT), medical, nursing, dental and public health schools, hospitals, community health centers, outpatient practices, industry, policymakers and health information exchanges. With access to ~7 million people, NJ ACTS serves as a ‘natural laboratory’ for translational and clinical research. The CTSA Hub focuses on two overarching themes: the heterogeneity of disease pathogenesis and response to treatment, and the value of linking large clinical databases with interventional clinical investigations to identify cause-and-effect and predict therapeutic responses. NJ ACTS will provide: innovative approaches to link information from large databases and electronic health records to inform clinical trial design, execution and analysis; and novel platforms for biomarker discovery using fluorescence in situ hybridization and machine learning to identify unique neural signatures of chronic illness.

CESP will serve as the NJ ACTS Internal Evaluator. Data collected by the internal evaluation team from individual core functions over the year will be aggregated in order to make summative evaluation findings. These findings will also be used by the SC and the EAC to suggest program improvements. Dr. Blitz will aid us in developing the optimal assessment metrics for our TL1 program, and act as Chair of the IARC. This project, funded by the National Institutes of Health, this project began in 2019 and is scheduled to run through 2024.