Multidisciplinary Translational Teams
The Multidisciplinary Translational Team (MTT) is a unique hybrid structure that includes goals of both an academic research team in knowledge generation and training with those of a product-driven business team to develop a device or intervention for clinical translation. MTT design characteristics include a strategic core of multidisciplinary investigators dynamically engaged in training, capacity development, and product generation. The interdependence and heterogeneous membership promotes innovation and effectiveness. Because of contextual influences within the academic health center, MTTs undergo reiterative rounds of adaptive evolution where team development and evolution are time-dependent and subject to disruptive quantum changes driven by new challenges in the field.
The ITS is proactively forming MTTs through the annual RFA issued by the Pilots key resource and the annual RFA process, held in the Spring in concert with new opportunities and UTMB’s strategic goals for research. MTTs will be selected on a number of criteria, including:
- A focus on patient-oriented research related to UTMB strategic initiatives (aging, environmental health, burns, airway inflammation, etc.);
- Committed, productive, and collaborative PIs;
- A need for CTSA key resources, and explicit use of the Translational Technologies key resource;
- Involvement of trainees, with K and other types of training awards as explicit goals; and
- Development of specific milestones for team progress, including plan(s) for new research funding. If an application for an MTT is funded, these milestones will be evaluated by a team of CTSA observers and will be periodically reviewed by the Coordination Core and approved by the Executive Committee.
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