FALL/WINTER 2007
Revising the 'how to' guide
(continued)
They all helped lead Dr. Barbara Nelson Alving (BS ’67, Biology) into a career of medical research. Her varied positions — public health research investigator, active duty military medical researcher, practicing physician, medical school professor — have prepared her for her most recent challenge. In April, she was appointed director of the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR), one of 27 centers and institutes that comprise the National Institutes of Health (NIH). NCRR provides funding to support medical research and science education across the country. She had been acting director of the center for two years.
“Research has always been a part of my training, even as a student at Purdue,” says Alving, who earned her medical degree from Georgetown University. “I spent a summer doing endocrinology research with M. X. Zaro in the Lilly Hall of Life Sciences.”
The ability to help with research so early in her academic career was important to Alving.
“I have always appreciated the fact that although Purdue is a large university, students receive special attention in many ways,” she says. “The Purdue experience is not one that is impersonal. Faculty at all levels are willing to teach and to talk with students.”
Different times call for different training
What she needed to know as a researcher in the 1960s and 1970s, however, has changed dramatically for similar researchers today.
“When I was being trained, I was never in the rigors of clinical trial — that was just being developed. I never learned how to do patents — that was just being developed. I was totally naïve,” Alving says.
With her leadership at NCRR, Alving hopes to give today’s researchers more tools to bring their discoveries to the public faster. She helped create and implement the Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) program while she was the center’s acting director. The CTSA offers funding for a different system of medical research, which NIH heralds as “the first systemic change in clinical research in 50 years.”
Over five years, CTSA will fund approximately 60 academic health centers that will be the foundation of medical research in the country.
Alving is excited about the potential benefits, especially the improved communication it will foster. Better communication among researchers will lead to the availability of better information for doctors and their patients. As they work in consort, the health centers will increase their collective knowledge, and ultimately, their ability to more efficiently move research from theory to accepted practice.
“It allows us to disseminate information into the population — through avenues such as telehealth and health information technology — and really hook up community doctors and make them a part of this process,” Alving says. “Most patients are treated in a community hospital, and this makes them part of the long continuum.”
NCRR funds also help offset construction costs of new research facilities and the creation of new degree programs at the academic health centers. The degree programs will focus on training the next generation of researchers. They will learn not only how to conduct research, but also how to move their findings through approval networks and into the medical market.
“If they can get a master’s degree in research, they can understand what it takes to move it forward; they’ll understand interactions with the Food and Drug Administration, with pharma or industry, or biotech,” Alving says.
Making researchers more knowledgeable about the process will create efficiency that will translate to better results for the consumer, Alving says.
Living on a budget
Even as researchers work to make medical research more efficient and accessible, they know their future rests on continued appropriations from Congress.
“We cannot lobby Congress for funding,” Alving says. “There are other lobbying groups who advocate for NIH. And we hope constituents feel that NIH is vital. There are a lot of areas demanding attention for funding.”
In addition, Alving and the members of the CTSA consortium must be cognizant of projected healthcare costs for the patients they hope to serve. The research funded by NCRR will create new avenues of treatment for a wide range of conditions, such as tuberculosis, acute coronary syndrome, or child psychiatry. Part of their goal is to make their discoveries as cost-effective as possible for the consumer.
“We’re very aware of the rising cost of healthcare,” she says. “We have to provide value that does not increase the percentage of income people pay for their care.”
As part of the CTSA project, Alving hopes more Americans are educated about preventive care and earlier treatments. The academic health centers will work with the communities they serve to create education programs. NCRR believes the community must be an active participant in the process for education to take hold. Health consumers will be asked to help participate in the design of clinical trials and be made to feel a part of the research endeavors.
Alving lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with her husband, Carl, a research physician at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. They have one grown son. 