Clinical and Translational Science Award:
One Health Alliance (COHA)
COHA is a consortium of 15 veterinary colleges associated with regional academic medical center partners. COHA’s mission is to advance our understanding of diseases shared by humans and animals. The alliance leverages the expertise of physicians, research scientists, veterinarians, and other professionals to find solutions for medical problems and to address the well-being of humans, animals, and the environment. This approach will capitalize on One Health opportunities that accelerate translational research.
Contact: Sue VandeWoude, steering committee member
Key Focus Areas:
The initial charge of this subcommittee is to characterize the breadth of veterinary clinical trials resources and expertise across member institutions and to establish recommendations for uniform operating procedures to facilitate multi-institutional trials.
CSU Committee Members: Wayne Jensen, Rod Page, Wendy Shelton, Kristen Weishaar
The initial goal of this subcommittee is to develop a plan that outlines infrastructure, data management systems, and personnel needs required to establish a national veterinary/animal bio-specimen repository and/or repository registry. This resource is envisioned to provide archival access to well-characterized and broadly phenotyped biological samples from veterinary patients.
CSU Committee Members: Susan Lana (subcommittee chair)
The goal of this subcommittee is to implement a plan to expand opportunities for clinical and translational research training to veterinary students and veterinarians. This includes providing clinical research training workshops to veterinary students, providing clinical research training workshops for new veterinary faculty and generating a shared library of web-based clinical research training modules.
CSU Committee Members: Anne Avery
The goal of this committee is to develop priorities and an implementation plan to increase awareness of the capabilities of COHA and other veterinary schools to support collaborative, translational research. To foster research collaborations and encourage trans-disciplinary grant seeking, COHA seeks to build a suite of programs including, an innovation video series featuring stories from COHA institutions and collaborators, One Health tracks at national medical meetings and One Health regional research symposia.
CSU Committee Members: Tracy Webb (subcommittee chair)
The goal of this project is to harmonize data from veterinary electronic medical records into a common data model so that patient case information can be readily shared across institutions for research recruitment and retrospective studies. CSU has hosted two COHA-sponsored workshops, in 2018 and 2019, to develop governance and technical infrastructure guidelines to enable and sustain such sharing. CSU is partnering with UC Davis and Tufts veterinary schools to create a pilot system to demonstrate technical feasibility. Formulating data governance structures and determining best practices to facilitate collaborative projects across institutions is also ongoing.
CSU Contacts: Colleen Webb and Kelly Hall (governance), and Joe Strecker (technical)