Wayne State University's School of Medicine is restructuring its clinical research activity with the creation of the Center for Translational Science and Clinical Research Innovation.

The center, created at the end of last year, aims to consolidate existing resources at the Detroit university and work more closely with the community to improve health care for the region. At the helm is Phillip Levy, M.D., assistant vice president for the center.

"One of our greatest strengths as an academic institution is our patient population," Levy said in a news release. "Detroiters suffer from substantial health disparities that we need to concentrate on. In conjunction with input from the community, our focus will be to improve health and promote wellness. This will be a center for Detroit, not just a center in Detroit."

Phillip Levy, M.D.

The new center, located at the university's Integrative Biosciences Center, a 200,000-square-foot medical research facility that opened in 2015, will enable researchers to work closely on projects.

"The idea started three or four years ago with the planning of the biosciences building," Levy, who also serves as associate chair of clinical research for WSU's department of emergency medicine, told Crain's. "We started to think about how a multidisciplinary approach could best be accomplished and what resources we needed."

The clinical research restructuring comes at the same time the medical school is working to erase a $29 million annual deficit that was discovered in 2015. Cost cutting, efficiency and revenue improvements trimmed the deficit to $17 million in 2016.

One of the primary reasons top medical school officials blamed for the deficit is underperforming research faculty. For example, the national average for tenured faculty with grants is about 40 percent. Wayne State's average recently hovered around 14 percent, officials said.

During the next three years, up to 40 faculty members — all basic scientists — have agreed to retire or will take buyouts, Jack Sobel, M.D., dean of the medical school, said told Crain's in November.

Sobel said Wayne State had recruited additional researchers and the bulk of the faculty now have clearer productivity expectations.

Of the 25-30 staff members now working in the new center, most were reallocated from the university's departments of family and emergency medicine, Levy said. Wayne State will fund the center with upward of $1 million a year, mainly for staff and operational costs.

Levy said the center has not been established through an official charter because "we didn't want to wait for the lengthy process of getting approval from the board of trustees," he said.

The center will include six major components, two of which existed before restructuring and two of which are not yet operational.

The Center for Community Engagement and Health is a new and functioning element of the center that aims to facilitate the activities of the community, university, government, health care systems and nonprofit organizations.

Levy said community engagement is among the center's top priorities and he hopes to achieve this through advisory boards, forums, networking and other ways of reaching out.

"There's often this idea of the conversation between researcher and subject as one-directional," he said. "But they should be informing us. We have to address the problems they identify."

Levy also noted the center will shift clinical research toward a more efficient, less transactional approach. "It's about making more resources more readily available without the perception of having to pay up front for them," he said.

The center will include an industry-facing entity called Clinical Research One at Wayne, which is a new and functioning entity formed from existing resources from the department of emergency medicine. It will serve as a central point of contact for the university's industry partners, coordinating industry-funded research, budgets, contracts and trial designs.

"The goal is to provide a one-stop shop for industry partners seeking to conduct research, which can in turn lead to growth in our technology commercialization potential," Levy said.

Clinical Research One has already secured $3 million in contracts, Levy said. One is with California-based Edwards Lifesciences for evaluation of a new device for noninvasive chemodynamic monitoring. Others include California-based Amgen Inc. and New York-based Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. for clinical heart failure trials.

Both the OnCore Specimen Repository and 4,900-square-foot Clinical Research Service Center existed but have been augmented, Levy said. The biorepository has added staff, including dedicated laboratory personnel and an expanded clinician presence, while the research center received enhanced data warehousing capabilities.

The Big Data Analytics Core and Epidemiology and Biostatistical Core are new components and works in progress.

"We have the basic structure in place to build upon," Levy said, adding that both should be fully functional in six months to a year.

The data analytics core is being formed from existing computer data science resources, Levy said, while the goal for the epidemiology and biostatistical core is to expand resources in the clinical research center, which currently includes five biostatisticians and one epidemiologist.

After the center becomes functional in all components, future expansion goals include neuroimaging and bio behavioral methodology and analysis, Levy said.

"The center was built to grow," Levy said. "It's not reactionary."