# Training OPportunities in Translational Imaging Education and Research (TOP-TIER)

> **NIH NIH T32** · WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY · 2021 · $253,681

## Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY
Precision medicine is emerging as an approach for disease treatment and prevention that takes into
account individual variability in genes, environment, and lifestyle. While some limited advances in precision
medicine have been made in the field of oncology, precision medicine is not in broad practice. Precision
medicine has become an initiative of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and its partners. Development
of methods of patient-specific biomarker imaging to guide and monitor patient-specific therapies will be
needed to move forward this new NIH initiative. A trained physician-scientist workforce is key to taking
advantage of these new developments. Precision imaging advances are interdisciplinary with technology
innovations crossing the physical, computational, and biological sciences. These studies start with
preclinical mechanistic inquiries using targeted pathology-based imaging and then expand into human
subjects. Human studies include safety testing and the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA)
Investigational New Drug (IND) and Device Exemption (IDE) process. The ultimate goal is to make research
innovations widely available to the public and the entire practicing medical community through
commercialization. Although this “bench-to-bedside” process has been widely acclaimed, there remains a
knowledge gap in the medical imaging research community as to how to take preclinical research into
humans, and how to then take these innovations to the public. Moreover, clinical scientists – residents and
fellows – often lack the understanding to navigate research regulatory requirements as well as the
knowledge base to understand or perform preclinical research that will inform the mechanism of innovation.
A completely new educational and creative paradigm is required to better prepare future imaging scientists
for the challenges of the NIH Precision Medicine Initiative. Interdisciplinary teams of physician-scientists
must work together at the interfaces of biology, technology, and medicine, and physicians must be
educated to work to bring innovation through the FDA regulatory processes, into human subjects and to
the public through commercialization. In this application, we propose a model of education unlike any other
for resident and fellow physician-scientists that will provide them with a two-year training program consisting
of a) a required curriculum (year 1) that covers not only training in the ethics, regulatory and practical
aspects of imaging research, but also a skill set for innovation translation, and b) dedicated translational
imaging research (year 2) under the mentorship of highly-accomplished imaging pre-clinical and clinician
scientists. With these needs and goals in mind, we are proposing TOP-TIER (Training OPportunities in
Translational Imaging Education and Research), a clinician-scientist post-doctoral training program at
Washington University (WU) in St. Louis to prepare resident and fellow trainees t...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10245164
- **Project number:** 5T32EB021955-05
- **Recipient organization:** WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** Samuel Achilefu
- **Activity code:** T32 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $253,681
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2017-08-07 → 2022-07-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10245164

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10245164, Training OPportunities in Translational Imaging Education and Research (TOP-TIER) (5T32EB021955-05). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-27 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10245164. Licensed CC0.

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