General Clinical Research Center

Principle Investigator/Program Director (Last, fv'st, middle): Bumett, John, M.D. This competitive renewal application requests continuous funding (years 34-38) of the Mayo General Clinical Research Center. The GCRC integrates inpatient and outpatient activities at two distinct sites: the Saint Marys Hospital unit (15,000 sq. ft.) has both inpatient and outpatient activity, and the Charlton Building outpatient GCRC (12,500 sq. R.) is exclusively for outpatients. The Charlton outpatient GCRC is an expansion of our program since the previous grant renewal and was opened in 2000 to meet the increasing demand for outpatient studies. In addition to the patient care areas, the GCRC has core laboratories, a metabolic kitchen, administrative offices, and conference rooms. A unique feature of the Mayo GCRC is the extensive core laboratory facilities to perform detailed phenotyping, metabolic measurements, and body composition measurements along with gastrointestinal, chemistry, exercise, sleep, microneurography, and echocardiography studies. Since the previous site visit, these facilities have been substantially modernized and expanded to include the addition of microarray and new mass spectrometers for proteomie measurements. We expanded the CDMAS program to an Informatics and Bioinformaties core, which links various GCRC operations and data handling for GCRC investigators. The inpatient utilization (~80% by NIH grants, 95% A beds) remains stable at about 2,100 beds; whereas, the outpatient utilization (-60% by NIH grants, 94% A visits) expanded more than three-fold to 18,000 visits per year. There was a more than two-fold increase in NIH grants to 86 grants and more than 200 protocols based in the GCRC. The major research activities are related to the following areas: 1) cancer therapies, 2) obesity and diabetes, 3) aging and hormonal secretion, 4) muscle, 5) osteoporosis, 6) vascular physiology, 7) gastric physiology, 8) mechanisms of incontinence, 9) sleep disorders, 10) autonomic neuropathy, 11) age-related valvular calcification, 12) hypertension, 13) vaccine research, and 14) neurodegenerative diseases. We have expanded education and training programs and outlined our vision for continued success of GCRC as a resource for human research at Mayo.