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Purpose

The Clusters of Clinical Research Excellence Award (CoCRE) was created with the goal of strengthening clinical research collaborations between Boston Children's Hospital investigators with the intent to enhance scientific impact, research efficiency, and synergistic partnerships to ultimately improve clinical outcomes or the delivery of care.

Developing CoCRE is an approach to organizing and refining institutional clinical research resources according to types of clinical research conducted by Boston Children's investigators (i.e. therapeutic interventional trials, health outcomes research, epidemiology studies, comparative effectiveness research, etc.).

The idea underlying the development of CoCRE is to organize a cluster or grouping of clinical researchers with similar interests led by a division/program with significant prior and ongoing experience in that type of research.

The overall philosophy is to bring additional institutional resources to clinical research but to decentralize support towards groupings of divisions/departments where clinical researchers will “cluster” together to provide expertise, share resources where it’s reasonable and to enhance support for clinical research. Among the greatest resources at Boston Children's is our collective experience in clinical research. 

Research Funding Announcement (RFA)

Next RFA: Spring 2022 (Instructions TBA)

Past RFA: June 15, 2020 

Awarded Clusters 

FY20

MAP-IT: Molecular Approaches to Immune Tolerance Therapy

The overall goal of this cluster is to develop novel cross-disciplinary approaches to immune tolerance therapy across several immune-mediated diseases and to identify molecular and/or cellular biomarkers that predict or correlate with response to these therapies. Despite their apparent clinical diversity, immune-mediated diseases including inflammatory bowel disease, renal allograft rejection and graft-versus-host disease all share a need for deep molecular profiling and for the development of novel therapies to induce immune tolerance. Each of the lead investigators in the divisions/programs that will participate in this cluster share the vision of cross-disciplinary immune tolerance research and have had prior interactions with several of the investigators in this CoCRE.

Faculty lead: Scott B. Snapper, MD, PhD

Project Period: 10/1/2020-9/30/2023

Emerging Pathogen and Epidemic Response Cluster of Clinical Research Excellence

This cluster brings together multidisciplinary expertise to allow Boston Children’s Hospital’s clinical research teams to respond quickly and efficiently to ongoing and emerging infectious epidemics. It is critical to be able to respond rapidly and safely to public health crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic with streamlined clinical research infrastructure that maximizes the resources and efforts that facilitate high quality investigation. Outcomes from research supported by this cluster will contribute to our understanding of these diseases, and how to treat and prevent them in children.

Faculty lead: Kristin Moffitt, MD

Project Period: 10/1/2020-9/30/2023

Respiratory Disease Cluster of Clinical Research Excellence

This cluster brings together multidisciplinary expertise to allow Boston Children’s Hospital’s clinical research teams to respond quickly and efficiently to ongoing and emerging infectious epidemics. It is critical to be able to respond rapidly and safely to public health crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic with streamlined clinical research infrastructure that maximizes the resources and efforts that facilitate high quality investigation. Outcomes from research supported by this cluster will contribute to our understanding of these diseases, and how to treat and prevent them in children.

Faculty lead: Gregory Sawicki, MD, and Jonathan Gaffin, MD

Project Period: 10/1/2020-9/30/2023

FY19

The Cardiovascular & Critical Care (CVCC)

The Cardiovascular & Critical Care (CVCC) Cluster of Clinical Research Excellence is a research collaboration between physicians and scientists in the fields of cardiology, cardiac surgery, intensive care, pain management, and nutrition. The Cluster supports the creation of patient contact tools, specialized databases and a biobank that will help improve the quality of clinical research for future investigators. The CVCC Cluster also designs and carries out research studies on children with special conditions that require treatment by cardiac and intensive care specialists.

Faculty lead: Lynn Sleeper, ScD

Project Period: 10/1/2019-9/30/2022

Neuroscience Cluster

The Cluster provides regulatory guidance, project management and study start-up for industry and PI-initiated clinical trials as well as registries, natural history studies and biomarker discovery projects. The cluster supports the creation and implementation of best practices in clinical research. Additionally, the Cluster provides consultation and direct assessment of study participants as needed for translational studies including clinical trials.

Faculty lead: Mustafa Sahin, MD, PhD

Project Period: 10/1/2019-9/30/2022