UC San Diego has received 37 million dollars from the National Institutes of Health to put medical research into practice. Translating basic research from the "bench to the bedside" is the purpose of the five-year grant from the NIH.
Dr. Gary Firestein is UCSD's dean of translational medicine. He said the money will fund clinical trials, technology, research and education to find practical applications for new discoveries.
"It's really not about a research program to allow us to pay our salaries and have tenure and write papers," he said. "It's really about improving human health."
The challenges of translational medicine include taking treatments that worked on lab mice and applying them to human subjects.
Firestein said the program will also focus on using new technology that can measure the effectiveness of drugs in the body.
