By Timothy F. Murphy, MD, SUNY Distinguished Professor of Medicine, Director of UB's Clinical and Translational Science Institute

In August 2015, a little more than 10 years ago, the University at Buffalo was awarded a four-year, $15 million Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). A five-year, $21.7 million CTSA followed in 2020, and in January 2025 the NIH awarded UB a seven-year, $28.4 million award. As we begin the second month of our second decade, it is time for us to look back at our accomplishments, reflect on our achievements, and plan for the future. Join me as we celebrate a decade of the CTSI and consider 10 key themes.

1. “Advancing research discoveries to improve health for all”

The UB CTSI, a member of the national CTSA consortium of more than 60 leading medical schools and academic health centers, was launched with a vision to advance and accelerate research to reduce adverse health outcomes and improve the health of our community and the nation. We serve as the hub for the Buffalo Translational Consortium (BTC), a growing regional collaboration of UB health sciences schools, leading clinical institutions, research institutes, and community organizations.

2. Services to and collaboration with research teams

CTSI cores — Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design (BERD); the Center for Biomedical Imaging; Clinical Research Facilitation; Community Engagement; Dissemination and Implementation Science; Informatics; the Institute for Healthcare Informatics; Mentored Career Development Program; Recruitment and Special Populations; Translational Pilot Studies; and Workforce Development — work with UB and BTC investigators and their teams to advance research across the entire translational spectrum. More than 10,000 consultations have taken place over the past 10 years.

3. Connecting with our community

We engage the community in all phases of clinical research — driving the research agenda, working as part of research teams, participating in clinical trials and benefitting from research results. Noteworthy examples include the Buffalo Research Registry of Western New Yorkers; the Participate in Research Portal of studies; our Buffalo Research News community newsletter; Community Engagement Studios sessions for researchers; our Community Partnership Development Seed Grants; Community Advisory Board; and “Sofia Learns About Research,” an activity and coloring book that spawned a video game, national presentations, and a scholarly publication, and is expanding with a new version covering cancer.

4. Pilot studies supporting innovative research

With an 11:1 return on investment, our CTSI Translational Pilot Studies Program has impacted healthcare, policy, and extramural funding. A total of 126 studies to faculty in eight different UB schools in addition to Roswell Park faculty have been funded by the pilot studies program since 2015. These studies have addressed health issues such as treatment of asthma in school-aged children in under-resourced neighborhoods, management of concussion, treatment and prevention of childhood obesity, treatment for orthopedic infections, and many others.

5. Education and training

As times have changed, so, too, have our methods of educating and training our research workforce. From the very start of CTSA funding, we have offered seminars and workshops, in-person and online. In addition, we have presented distinguished speakers, created educational videos, and hosted events such as our CTSI Pilot Studies Colloquium and Annual Forum.

6. Preparing the next generation of translational science leaders

Our Mentored Career Development Program has trained 22 new K Scholars, via a two-year multi-faceted program. These UB and Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center faculty are expert clinical and translational scientists whose work is already impacting health and healthcare. This program continues to be a showcase for rising research faculty.

7. CTSA collaboration

We have collaborated extensively with other sites in the national CTSA consortium, learning from others and sharing our innovations with them. We have an excellent partnership with the Penn State CTSI in which we do an exchange of reviews of our pilot studies proposals, eliminating inevitable conflicts of interest that arise in identifying reviewers from our own CTSA hubs. Under the leadership of Larry Hawk, PhD (UB), and Martin Mahoney, MD, PhD (Roswell Park), the UB CTSI leads a prestigious CTSA Collaborative and Innovative Acceleration Award that includes CTSA partners from University of Pennsylvania, Medical University of South Carolina, and University of Alabama at Birmingham to compare remote recruitment to clinical trials with in-person recruitment. These are just two of many examples of productive partnership with other CTSA hubs.

8. More clinical trials

The CTSI has worked extensively with the university-wide Clinical Research Office in supporting UB researchers to triple the number of clinical trials at UB and partners and speed start-up. We have developed an extensive Recruitment Resources Toolkit with a wide variety of tools to help research teams with recruitment and retention in clinical trials. With the toolkit and consults from our CTSI Recruitment Team, our researchers have had excellent success in increasing the number of members of our community enrolling in clinical research studies, particularly those from groups who are often excluded from the benefits of participating in clinical research.

9. Pivoting to address the COVID-19 pandemic

When the pandemic began in 2020, the CTSI pivoted with support for research teams to performing remote clinical trials, engaging the workforce with remote training, and collaborating with the community to advance research, prevention and treatment. Through our participation in the national CTSA consortium, we brought several trials to Buffalo to test new treatments for COVID-19. In addition, CTSI faculty were actively involved in engaging community members and leaders to ensure that the highly effective vaccines, once available, reached all of our communities. This work saved lives in our region.

10. Looking forward

We will build on this extraordinary momentum with new, bold, ambitious initiatives with an overarching focus on improving the health of our community. Examples include leveraging the exciting implementation of a common electronic health record (EHR) in the region to create a clinical data repository of the entire region; advance our growing partnership with community health workers; expand the reach of our new Dissemination and Implementation Science Core to advance our community partnerships; actively collaborate with world-class AI experts at UB to raise the level and innovation of our research while ensuring integrity and accuracy; and many other new initiatives. The future of the University at Buffalo Clinical and Translational Science Institute is bright.

I know I speak for our CTSI faculty and staff, affiliated researchers, board members, university leadership, and community partners, when I say how excited we are to continue “advancing research discoveries to improve health for all.”