programHarvard Catalyst - CTSC
Harvard Catalyst is pan-Harvard University enterprise dedicated to improving human health. It is a shared enterprise of Harvard University, its ten schools and its eighteen Academic Healthcare Centers (AHC), as well as the Boston College School of Nursing, MIT, the Cambridge Health Alliance, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care and numerous community partners. Harvard Catalyst was founded in May 2008 with a five year, $117.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (Clinical and Translational Science Center, CTSC) and $75 million dollars from the Harvard University Science and Engineering Committee, Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Public Health, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Children’s Hospital Boston, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital. The resources of the Harvard Catalyst are available to all faculties at Harvard regardless of their institutional affiliation or academic degree.
We believe that the key elements for success in clinical and translational research already exist at Harvard including the intellectual force, technologies, and clinical expertise necessary to reduce the burden of human illness. What is missing is a systematic way for investigators from disparate disciplines and institutions to find each other and form teams, to gain open access to tools and technologies, and to obtain seed funding to embark upon new areas of investigation. This demands a systematic effort to remove the barriers and obstacles to cross-institutional collaboration. A catalyst lowers the barriers to reaction, and thus speeds a reaction that would normally have occurred at a much slower rate. Speeding the reduction of human illness is the only function of the Harvard Catalyst.
How will the Harvard Catalyst achieve its mission? Simply stated, it will bring faculty, post-doctoral fellows, clinical trainees, and graduate students from across the University together to attack human illness. There is great enthusiasm among basic scientists — including biologists, engineers, chemists, and physicists — for new collaborative efforts to decipher the mechanisms of human disease, develop new diagnostics, and develop new strategies and agents to treat or prevent human illness. The barriers they face include a lack of understanding of diseases, inability to identify the most important scientific questions, and lack of access to clinical collaborators. Likewise, researchers who conduct studies on individual patients or populations are eager to bring their most pressing clinical questions to the laboratory but often do not know how to find scientific partners who would be interested and willing to collaborate. Once investigators find each other, they need access to relevant technologies, to human material, to patients and normal subjects, to expert help in areas such as biostatistics, biomedical informatics, genetics or imaging, and to pilot funds to catalyze high-risk, high-impact projects. In addition, we need to build on existing strengths at Harvard to nurture a new culture of academic-community partnership that will increase the relevance of Harvard’s research to the needs of the community. Engaging academe with community members, practitioners, and health care delivery systems will greatly inform the priorities, conduct, and dissemination of translational research. Many of these new challenges and opportunities will require collaboration with our colleagues in the law, business, government, divinity, and education schools. Success is not a specific output but a change in the structure of our community: when investigators from many institutions come together to collaborate on developing a new diagnostic or a novel approach to treatment or prevention, that is a success.
The Harvard Catalyst is a member of a national consortium of medical research institutions funded through the NIH Clinical and Translational Science Awards. The Harvard Catalyst will collaborate with other consortium members to bring their rich resources to Harvard and to bring Harvard’s resources to the national enterprise.
Affiliation: Harvard Medical School, HUSEC, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital, Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, Dana-Farber Cancer Center, Joslin Diabetes Center, Children's Hospital Boston, McLean HospitalWeb site: Harvard Catalyst
