Wright Regional Center for Clinical and Translational Science

Building on the VCU C. Kenneth and Dianne Wright Center for Clinical and Translational Research and its research endowment, the Wright Regional Center for Clinical and Translational Science (Wright Regional CCTS) is a collaboration of partner institutions that serves regions of Virginia and North Carolina, including Eastern

Virginia Medical School, a community focused medical school in Norfolk, Virginia with a strong community engaged research program in low income housing; Old Dominion University, a diverse public university in Norfolk Virginia with strengths in machine learning and AI techniques for biomedical data; Virginia

Commonwealth University, a public university in Richmond, Virginia which has been a CTSA hub since 2010, with strengths in community engaged research; and Virginia State University, a Historically Black College and University with expertise to advance workforce diversity. The Overall Objective of the Wright Regional CCTS is to advance health equity through actively

engaging diverse communities, training a diverse research workforce, and supporting the rapid implementation of innovative clinical and translational science (CTS) with our partners and collaborators and throughout the CTSA program. This will be carried out though the following Specific Aims: Aim 1: Enhance translational research workforce development with a focus on diversity to ultimately

enhance recruitment of diverse patient populations into clinical research. Aim 2: Use health outcomes data to develop tools and methods to document differences in health outcomes within the community to support the goal of achieving health equity. Aim 3: Promote protocol review and oversight to enhance the quality of clinical research and reduce the

timeline for regulatory approval. Aim 4: Work together across partner and collaborator institutions to use informatics data and tools to promote interoperability of data for high impact clinical research. Aim 5: Build on our existing community engagement and telehealth infrastructure to enhance recruitment

of hard-to-reach low income and rural patient populations into clinical research. Impact: The Wright Regional CCTS will build on our strengths in community engaged research to support innovative translational science tools to address health equity in collaboration with our partners and community. We will enhance the diversity and rural impact of our translational research workforce, extend protocol review

and oversight processes to improve the quality and efficiency of clinical research, develop innovative methods to engaged hard to reach low-income and rural patient populations in clinical research, and disseminate and implement successful CTS programs in our community and across the CTSA network.