move discoveries into real-world patient care faster and at scale
In the long effort to close the gap between scientific discovery and patient care, NYU Langone Health has secured a $70 million, seven-year federal grant — the highest tier available under the NIH's translational science program. The award sustains an institute that has quietly served as the connective tissue between laboratory insight and clinical practice since 2009, supporting nearly 5,000 research efforts and cultivating a new generation of scientists. At its core, this is a wager that shared infrastructure, built at scale and opened to all, can move healing from the bench to the bedside faster and more equitably than any single lab could manage alone.
- The gap between scientific discovery and actual patient treatment remains one of medicine's most stubborn failures — and this grant is a direct attempt to close it.
- NYU Langone's Clinical and Translational Science Institute has fielded nearly 5,000 research support requests since 2009, but sustaining that infrastructure requires the kind of long-term federal commitment that is never guaranteed.
- Securing the NIH's maximum funding tier signals that the institute's model — shared biostatistics, patient data access, trial logistics, and early-career mentorship — has earned national recognition as a replicable blueprint.
- Over the next seven years, the institution will push to shrink the time between trial design and first patient enrollment, a bottleneck that quietly delays breakthroughs for years.
- New York City's vast demographic and economic diversity gives the CTSI unusual reach, turning the urban landscape into a living laboratory where equity in access to innovation is not an afterthought but a stated design principle.
NYU Langone Health has received a nearly $70 million, seven-year grant from the National Institutes of Health — the maximum available under the federal Clinical and Translational Science Awards program — to sustain and expand its Clinical and Translational Science Institute. The CTSI exists to solve a persistent problem in medicine: discoveries made in laboratories take far too long to reach the patients who need them. Since opening in 2009, the institute has handled close to 5,000 research support requests, with more than half coming from early-career investigators. Those projects have produced over 1,500 grants and an equal number of peer-reviewed publications.
The institute functions as shared infrastructure — providing biostatistics support, access to de-identified patient records, clinical trial logistics, and funding for emerging researchers — resources that individual labs and departments could never afford to build independently. Director Miriam Bredella described the award as confirmation that this model of collective, scalable infrastructure is the right approach to accelerating discovery into care.
The next seven years will bring five focused priorities: deeper community-engaged research, broader access to health informatics tools, cross-disciplinary workforce training, expanded regional and national partnerships, and a push to reduce the lag between trial design and first patient enrollment. NYU Langone's reach across its own hospitals, the city's public health system, and all eleven schools of New York University gives the CTSI access to the full demographic and economic range of New York City — not a narrow patient sample, but a genuinely diverse urban population.
Chief scientific officer Dafna Bar-Sagi framed the mission plainly: the goal is not merely to generate innovation, but to ensure it reaches patients quickly, equitably, and at scale — a commitment that treats breadth of benefit as inseparable from the science itself.
NYU Langone Health has landed a nearly $70 million grant from the National Institutes of Health—the highest funding tier available under the federal government's Clinical and Translational Science Awards program. The seven-year renewal will sustain and expand the institution's Clinical and Translational Science Institute, an operation designed to do one thing: move scientific discoveries out of the lab and into the hands of doctors treating actual patients.
The CTSI, which has been running since 2009, functions as a kind of shared infrastructure for researchers across NYU Langone's sprawling network. Individual departments and labs cannot afford to build their own biostatistics teams, maintain massive patient databases, or manage the logistics of clinical trials. The institute provides all of it—statistical support, access to de-identified patient records at scale, connections to trial networks, and funding to develop early-career researchers. Over its first 16 years, the institute fielded nearly 5,000 requests for support. More than half came from investigators still early in their careers, which means the CTSI has become a pipeline for the next generation of translational scientists. Those projects have yielded more than 1,500 grants and an equal number of peer-reviewed publications.
Miriam Bredella, the institute's director and a radiology professor, framed the award as validation of a particular vision: that the infrastructure for turning discovery into care should be built once, at scale, and made available to the entire research community rather than hoarded by individual labs. "This award positions NYU Langone at the forefront of translational science," she said. "Through the CTSI, we are building the infrastructure to move discoveries into real-world patient care faster and at scale."
The renewal comes with five explicit priorities for the next seven years. NYU Langone will deepen its community-engaged research—work done in partnership with the neighborhoods and populations it serves rather than on them. The institute will broaden access to health informatics tools, train researchers across all career stages and disciplines, forge collaborations with other institutions regionally and nationally, and work to shrink the time between when a clinical trial is designed and when it actually enrolls its first patient.
The institution's geography gives it unusual leverage for this work. NYU Langone operates not just its own hospitals and clinics but also runs the Family Health Centers across the city and partners with NYC Health + Hospitals, the public system. It is entangled with all eleven schools and colleges of New York University itself. That means the CTSI can access and engage a genuinely diverse urban population—not a convenience sample of college students or affluent patients, but the full demographic and economic range of New York City. The city becomes, in effect, a living laboratory.
Dafna Bar-Sagi, the institution's chief scientific officer, emphasized that this is not abstract infrastructure work. "Translational research is central to our mission at NYU Langone," she said. "The CTSI is a critical institutional engine that allows us to turn scientific discovery into better care for patients across New York City and beyond. This award reflects both the strength of our research enterprise and our commitment to ensuring that innovation reaches patients quickly, equitably, and at scale." The emphasis on equity and scale signals that the goal is not to benefit a narrow slice of the population but to ensure that breakthroughs reach the widest possible group of people who need them.
Citas Notables
This award positions NYU Langone at the forefront of translational science. Through the CTSI, we are building the infrastructure to move discoveries into real-world patient care faster and at scale.— Miriam A. Bredella, MD, MBA, director of the CTSI
The CTSI is a critical institutional engine that allows us to turn scientific discovery into better care for patients across New York City and beyond. This award reflects both the strength of our research enterprise and our commitment to ensuring that innovation reaches patients quickly, equitably, and at scale.— Dafna Bar-Sagi, PhD, chief scientific officer and executive vice president
La Conversación del Hearth Otra perspectiva de la historia
What does it actually mean to move a discovery from the lab into patient care? That sounds simple but I suspect it isn't.
It's the hardest part of science. You can have a brilliant finding in a petri dish, but getting it into a hospital where it helps a real person—that requires statisticians, ethicists, regulatory expertise, access to patient data, the ability to run a trial. Most labs can't afford any of that alone.
So the CTSI is basically saying: we'll handle that infrastructure for you.
Exactly. Instead of every researcher building their own team, they share one. It's much cheaper, and it means more people can do this work—especially early-career scientists who have ideas but no budget.
The grant is for seven years. Why that timeframe?
Federal grants are structured in cycles. Seven years gives the institute time to launch new initiatives, see results, and plan for the next phase. It's long enough to matter but short enough to require accountability.
You mentioned the city is a living laboratory. What does that mean in practice?
NYU Langone isn't isolated in a wealthy neighborhood. It runs public clinics, partners with the city hospital system, works across all five boroughs. So when they test something, they're testing it on a real cross-section of New York—different incomes, languages, health histories. That's more honest science.
And the 5,000 requests since 2009—are those all successful?
Not all. But the fact that half came from early-career researchers means the institute is doing what it set out to do: creating a pathway for the next generation. Some of those people will become leaders in the field.