Ground zero for clinical research in this country could well be the Duke Clinical Research Institute (DCRI) in Durham, North Carolina. “It’s productive, successful, and has been training great clinical scientists,” explains Dr. Bob Kocher of Venrock, who worked on a strategy and growth plan for DCRI back when he was at McKinsey. “It created a culture of research that trained clinicians to use quantitative methods to solve clinical problems and trained data scientists (biostats and informatics) to understand clinical issues,” adds Dr. Robert Harrington, who led the DCRI for six years before coming to Palo Alto as Chair of Medicine at Stanford.
Duke has had a place in my heart ever since I attended math camp there, and I recently accepted an invitation to return to Durham to spend a day with DCRI fellows and faculty, discussing the future of clinical research.
Implementation Science
Although I expected much of the conversation to involve the execution and conduct of the large therapeutics trials for which the DCRI is perhaps best known, what struck me instead was the evident widespread passion for what might be broadly classified as implementation science – closing the gap between theory and practice, between the promise of a “successful” clinical trial and the actual outcomes of real world patients afflicted with the associated condition.
At a certain level, this focus on implementation (as I recently discussed) shouldn’t be surprising, and is viewed by some – such Former FDA Commissioner and the founder of the DCRI Dr. Robert Califf – as part of the organic evolution of the DCRI (and arguably, clinical research more generally). He explained to me,
