From the lab bench to the bedside

Clinical trials can discover life-saving care, making it essential for researchers to easily identify and recruit eligible participants from varied backgrounds. 

UC’s five Clinical and Translational Science Award campuses (CTSAs) – UC Davis, UC Irvine, UCLA, UC San Diego, and UC San Francisco – are powerful engines of “bench to bedside” medical research. The principal investigators at the five CTSA campuses launched UC BRAID to remove administrative barriers to research, facilitate opportunities for multi-site collaboration, and develop resources that can be used by all campuses. Thanks to UC BRAID’s leadership,  the CTSAs can more easily collaborate with each other and share data to facilitate new treatments, medications, and technologies for care tailored to patient needs. These relationships help connect researchers and patients to nearly 5,000 clinical trials, spanning more than 2,400 conditions in areas such as lung cancer, diabetes, melanoma, COVID-19, and more.

Collaborating for care

The pilot study speaks to UC BRAID’s systemwide goals – foster research collaboration and alignment, coordinate campus programs to maximize UC Health’s ability to conduct innovative clinical and translational research and engage California’s diverse communities to guide and advocate for community-informed research.

This means that patients recruited through the UCHDW pilot can now contribute to the collective research knowledge of the multi-site UC Health system, regardless of where they live in California.