Staff Report
Published Oct. 6, 2009
The National Institutes of Health has awarded a $4.8 million federal grant to the University of South Carolina’s Healthcare Quality Center of Economic Excellence.
The funding will accelerate the development of a statewide Internet-based research network that will enable patients to identify and volunteer for clinical research trials in the state, receive notifications of future research trials related to their condition and protect their personal health information.
The Research Permissions Management System also will help enable researchers to manage legal, ethical, social and bioinformatics requirements.
The multimillion-dollar grant is part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
Jay Moskowitz, who is based at USC, is the grant’s principal investigator and the center’s endowed chair in translational research. Dr. Iain Sanderson, a co-investigator based at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, is the center’s endowed chair for medical informatics.
Moskowitz, who also is president and CEO of Health Sciences South Carolina, said the grant will offer more treatment options to people suffering from serious disease.
“For people with life-threatening illnesses like cancer, clinical research trials are often the last bastion of hope,” he said. “Increasingly, patients and their family members are looking to the Internet for a medical lifeline. It is our goal to extend the lifeline and to more people in and outside of South Carolina with the statewide Research Permission Management System.
“With this system, patients will soon be able to find clinical trials at HSSC partner organizations, provide informed consent, protect their privacy and receive notification of future trials related to their condition. They also will have the option of donating discarded tissue samples to research studies that will then help other people.”
The Center for Healthcare Quality is a Center of Economic Excellence established in 2006 with state funds from the S.C. Education Lottery and a private match from Health Sciences South Carolina made possible by The Duke Endowment.
