The General Clinical Research Center at Children's Hospital
The NIH-funded General Clinical Research Center (GCRC), continuously funded since 1964, is an eight-bed unit centrally located within the main building of Children's Hospital Boston. The annual budget of the GCRC is just over $1.9 million direct costs per year. Support provided by the GCRC includes a core laboratory and core programs in informatics, biostatistics, nutrition, and phenotype/genotype. The GCRC Program Director is Dr. Richard Grand, one of the Co-Directors of this training program. The GCRC serves as the central focus of clinical research on the Children's Hospital campus. Currently, the GCRC is supporting 80 active protocols, involving 9 departments in the hospital and 9 divisions of the Department of Medicine. Special facilities include a metabolic kitchen and dining room, a DXA scanner (Hologic), and an indirect calorimeter. A major effort to train young clinical investigators has yielded 17 current mentored junior faculty (NIH K series) awards involving GCRC protocols.
The General Clinical Research Center at MIT
The MIT GCRC is a 12,227 square feet, NIH-funded, seven-bed unit. It incorporates four full time nurses, a core laboratory, DXA facilities, and a mass spectrometry lab. An infusion room is available for stable isotope studies and euglycemic hyperinsulinemic clamp studies. The MIT GCRC has a full bionutrition staff capable of performing nutritional analyses, including energy expenditure, bioimpedance analysis, and anthropometric measurements. In addition, MIT has the capacity to perform vascular tonometry and detailed neurocognitive testing.
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