Instead of just suggesting what others can do I'll have to actually do something myself here. Making sure they actually know what they are doing.
http://www.heritage.com/articles/2013/12/25/ann_arbor_journal/news/doc52b84bf9e7fc6439175394.txt
Nine hospitals in southeast Michigan have come together to form one of
25 regional stroke networks across the nation that will allow teams of
researchers representing every medical specialty needed for stroke care
to address the three prongs of stroke research: prevention, treatment
and recovery.
The new Michigan StrokeNet and its counterpart
networks were announced Dec. 13 by the National Institutes of Health. It
is the only network in Michigan, and will seek to add additional
Michigan hospitals over time.
Michigan StrokeNet will be
coordinated by the University of Michigan Health System’s Stroke
Program, and involves two U-M Health System hospitals, two from the
Trinity Health system and five Detroit Medical Center hospitals. Dr.
Philip Scott and Dr. Devin Brown of U-M’s Department of Emergency
Medicine and Department of Neurology will serve as co-principal
investigators.
“The new system is intended to streamline stroke
research, by centralizing approval and review, lessening time and costs
of clinical trials, and assembling a comprehensive data sharing system,”
said Dr. Petra Kaufmann, the associate director for clinical research
at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS).
NINDS, which will fund and manage the NIH Stroke Trials Network, or NIH StrokeNet, has a strong history
of successful stroke clinical trials over the past 40 years, leading to
some astonishing advances in treatment and prevention of the disease,
including the first treatment for acute stroke, announced in 1995.
The
25 networks are strategically placed in every region of the country.
All have experience in stroke research and recruitment, including the
ability to enroll underrepresented populations, and were required to
offer access to the full cadre of specialties that are involved in
stroke care. These include: emergency medicine, neurosurgery,
interventional neuroradiology, vascular neurology, neurointensive care,
neuroimaging, stroke rehabilitation and pediatric neurology. Each
network will receive infrastructure funding for research and education
support, with $50,000 per year allocated to train the next generation
of stroke clinical researchers.
U-M is already the home of the
national clinical coordinating center of the NIH-funded Neurological
Emergencies Treatment Trials network, which coordinates studies on the
emergency care of a range of brain-related issues.
The nine participants in Michigan StrokeNet are:
— University Hospital (U-M Health System), Ann Arbor
— Saint Joseph Mercy Health System, Ann Arbor
— Saint Mary Mercy, Livonia
— DMC Detroit Receiving Hospital, Detroit
— DMC Sinai-Grace Hospital, Detroit
— DMC Harper University Hospital, Detroit
— DMC Rehabilitation Institute of Michigan, Detroit
— DMC Children’s Hospital of Michigan, Detroit
— C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital (U-M Health System), Ann Arbor
The
University of Cincinnati will manage the national clinical coordinating
center, which will oversee and coordinate the institutional review
board and master trial agreements for all of the regional centers. NIH
will announce the award of a national data management center in
February.
NIH StrokeNet investigators, working with the broader
stroke community, will propose, develop and conduct stroke protocols to
be administered within the network and train the future generation of
clinical researchers in stroke.
Historically, the model for
stroke clinical trials was to complete large teams of personnel and
infrastructure, which were then disassembled once the trial was
completed. This led to delays in patient recruitment and additional
costs when new trials were initiated, with some stroke clinical trials
lasting many years longer than anticipated and costing millions of
dollars more than the original estimate.
In a 2013 article in Stroke, Story Landis, NINDS director, and co-author
Dr. Marc Fisher wrote: “Because our ultimate goal is to test and
compare therapies that will have a real impact on patient health, a
coordinated and long range approach to solving challenges in stroke
trial research is sorely needed.”
The network concept evolved
from an NINDS planning effort in which stroke experts were asked what is
most needed to reduce death and disability due to stroke in the United
States. They called for a nationwide stroke network that would allow for
a more seamless transition between early safety and efficacy trials and
Phase II and III clinical trials.
“NIH StrokeNet will allow the
most promising therapies to quickly advance to the clinic, to improve
prevention, acute treatment, or rehabilitation of the stroke patient,”
said Dr. Walter J. Koroshetz, NINDS deputy director. “We need to have a
balance of approaches to decrease the burden of illness due to stroke.”
“Our
goal for the NIH Stroke Centers Network is to initiate four to five
NINDS-funded exploratory Phase I and II stroke clinical trials, and two
to four Phase III trials over the next five years. This is a major
challenge which we believe the stroke research community will embrace,”
said Dr. Scott Janis, NINDS program director of the NIH
StrokeNet.
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