The University of Minnesota deploys
inSORS Grid for NIH Roadmap Grant

Roadmap Grants and inSORS aim to Re-engineer the Clinical Research Process

February 24, 2005

(Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN) The University of Minnesota was awarded an NIH Roadmap grant for medical research in the 21 st century. The grant will be used to deploy a series of inSORS Grid (IG) nodes to increase collaboration between member sites participating in the research. The NIH Roadmap is a series of far-reaching initiatives designed to transform the nation’s medical research capabilities and speed the movement of research discoveries from the bench to the bedside. Kevin Peterson, M.D., professor of family medicine and community health and Steven Cawley, associate vice president of technology, are the principal investigators from the university. Birmingham University, England and the University of California, San Francisco are also collaborating on the project.

Clinical research is the linchpin of the nation's biomedical research enterprise. Before a therapy is approved for general use, it must be studied carefully in the laboratory to understand how the treatment works, how effective it is, and what potential risks may exist. The safety and benefits of the therapy for humans must then be proven through an orderly series of tests in people. Over the years, medical research has succeeded in converting many diseases once considered uniformly lethal into more chronic, treatable conditions. Yet clinical research has become increasingly difficult to do and it has become clear to the scientific community that the United States must recast its entire system of clinical research if such efforts are to remain as successful as they have been in the past. To accelerate and strengthen the clinical research process, a set of NIH Roadmap initiatives will work toward improving the clinical research enterprise by adopting a systematic infrastructure that will better serve the evolving field of scientific discovery. This effort, which compliments the strong points of the inSORS Grid technology, will provide the necessary foundation for advancing basic and clinical research. With the NIH Roadmap and the IG in action, investigators will be better poised to translate basic discoveries into the reality of better health for our nation.

For more information on the NIH Roadmap initiatives please visit http://nihroadmap.nih.gov/index.asp. For more information on inSORS please contact Brian Gleason at bgleason@insors.com or visit us on the web at www.insors.com.