University of Washington's Clinical Research Center

The University of Washington (UW) Clinical Research Center (CRC) is a core resource within the Institute of Translational Health Sciences (ITHS) that provides clinical research space and support for investigators conducting research with human subjects. The mission of the CRC is to enable investigators to conduct research protocols in the clinical setting.

Facilities

Located at University of Washington Medical Center on 7 South, the CRC facility is a resource for faculty at UW, Seattle Children's, and other Seattle area medical centers. Space dedicated to the CRC patient care area includes:

  • Five patient care rooms (a total of 9 beds) for both overnight and day use
  • Three patient care rooms (a total of 7 recliner chairs) for day useA blood draw at the UW CRC.
  • A multi-purpose room used for blood draws, interviews
  • A consult room
  • A study staff room
  • A disability accessible shower/toilet
  • A clean utility and medication room
  • A soiled utility and specimen processing room
  • A staff work room
  • A nourishment room / tray hold area
  • A conference room.

Services

  • Clinic space where you can see your outpatient subjects
  • Inpatient unit where your inpatient subjects can be hospitalized overnight or for prolonged stays
  • Full-time clinical research nursing staff trained in Good Clinical Practice (GCP) and expert in implementing research protocols.  The nursing staff can provide:
    • Development of orders for all your protocols
    • Assistance with research study documents under GCP compliance
    • Study questionnaires
    • Source documents
    • Procedure checklists
  • A primary nurse specifically assigned to your protocol to function as a member of your clinical research team.  We make every attempt to assign you the same primary nurse for your protocols so that person can develop some level of expertise in your research area.
  • Specimen collection and processing during the conduct of your study
  • Short-term storage of specimens in our laboratory
  • Conference room use for scheduling research projects or your clinical research meetings
  • Clinical research monitoring to ensure patient safety

If you have any questions about the procedures we are able to perform on the CRC, please contact Nurse Manager Timothy P. Ehling, MN, RN.

 

How researchers use this resource or service

The CRC is available for anyone to use, regardless of location, department, school, or even institution. We conduct investigator- initiated studies, studies performed with industry sponsors, as well as pilot studies. The CRC can conduct therapeutic trials, observational studies, feeding trials, questionnaire based studies and even population based studies requiring high throughput blood draws and sample collection for research on novel biomarkers. If you have any questions about whether your study is right for the CRC please contact Nurse Manager Timothy P. Ehling, MN, RN.

 

Examples of some of the type of research we conduct are listed below:

image of a patient lying in bed as nurse checks pulse

  • Anesthesiology: Pain control in children, post-operative agitation in children.
  • Cardiology: Atherosclerosis progression; nonintervention technology in assessment of cardiac function, role of exercise in modulating heart failure
  • Endocrinology and Metabolism: Pathophysiology of type I and type II diabetes; mechanism of insulin secretion and role of other gastrointestinal peptides; complications of diabetes; mechanism of body weight regulation
  • Gastroenterology: Interventional therapy for chronic hepatitis, treatment for children infected with hepatitis.
  • Gene and Cell Therapy: Adoptive immunotherapy with gene modified or unmodified T cells for metastatic melanoma, lymphoma, and solid tumors
  • Hematology: Effect of recombinant colony-stimulating factors in cyclic and chronic neutropenia and in normal neutrophil kinetics; progenitor cell mobilization in sickle cell anemia.
  • HIV: Pain control and HIV, novel therapeutics for HIV, methods for monitoring HIV infection, HIV infection in pregnancy.
  • Immunology: Acquired and genetic syndromes of diminished resistance to infection. Chronic neutropenia, study of immunity and cancer. Clinical trials of cancer vaccines.
  • Infectious Diseases: Multidrug therapy for HIV infection, multidrug and biological response modifier therapy for hepatitis B and C, kinetics of HSV infections, HSV infections post transplant.
  • Nephrology: Kidney transplant rejection studies, glomerulosclerosis in children, kidney transplants in children.
  • Neurology: New therapies for multiple sclerosis.
  • Obstetrics and Gynecology: Role of central obesity in postmenopausal women and in placenta previa.
  • Oncology: New transplant therapies for leukemia and lymphoma, vaccine therapy for breast and ovarian cancer, immunotherapy for cancer, novel strategies for treating brain tumors in children, T cell therapy and immune therapy for melanoma, antibody therapy for lymphoma.
  • Pharmacology: Drug metabolism in pregnancy, pharmacology of anti-viral agents, drug levels in mothers milk.
  • Psychiatry: Hormonal control of brain function, childhood schizophrenia, adolescent patterns of self-harm, studies of family depression.
  • Pulmonary: New therapies for cystic fibrosis (CF), quality of life studies in CF, genetic diagnosis of CF, chronic lung disease in infants, role of environmental exposures in lung injury, immune based therapies for sarcoidosis, childhood asthma.
  • Rehabilitation: Hypnosis in disability related pain
  • Rheumatology: Childhood arthritis treatments, cardiac disease in pediatric lupus.

Fees

The CRC operates as a "fee for service" core. Investigators planning to use the CRC for their research must work with Center staff to plan a budget for any grant or proposal submission. Any grant submitted on or after May 20, 2008 must have a CRC budget associated with the proposal to have access to the CRC facilities. Of note, Technology and Resource Access Grants are available to fund CRC costs.

In general, costs of routine and ancillary hospital services for hospital-provided research patient care services are based on the annual "research patient care rate agreement" negotiated with the HHS Division of Cost Allocation Office. Charges for non-hospital services are developed using a cost center model and are based on actual cost of services.

All CRC users are charged a start-up fee that covers the cost of protocol review and study set-up in the ITHS systems. The start-up fee also encompasses costs associated with regulatory compliance.

Any investigator may use CRC services, however, ITHS members are eligible for reduced fees via an ITHS supported subsidy of services. The ITHS acknowledges that the conduct of clinical research studies on the CRC is expensive, thus, subsidies are available for CRC use based on study category.

Industry initiated research is not eligible for a subsidy. The ITHS Leadership will annually determine the level of subsidy support as part of the UW rate setting processes and will base the ITHS subsidy rates on projected available funds and projected service demand.

Getting started

Read getting started at the UW CRC.

If you have any questions,  send email to Timothy P. Ehling, MN, RN, Nurse Manager.

Last modified: September 23, 2009