Building a Translational Workforce Innovation Network (TWIN)

Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston MA

Investigators

Linked publications & trials

Abstract

There are a growing number of efforts across the country to create an educated workforce for the biomedical sciences, engineering, and technology, and related industries. There is a significant need to incorporate the differential needs of women and men into the world of entrepreneurship and product development to enhance scientific discovery and creative solutions for medical needs. In this Administrative Supplement, we begin to address this need by applying it to our SCORE scientific mission of identifying immune abnormalities, with fetal origins, that have consequences for sex differences in depression and comorbidity with autonomic dysregulation and cardio- and neuro-vascular dysfunction in later life. Women are at twice the risk for the co- occurrence of this, leading to an increased risk of death in women. We will elevate the scientific mission of our SCORE and its Career Enhancement Core (CEC) by formulating a pipeline program that infuses consideration of sex differences that are shared across the brain and heart to create a SCORE Translational Workforce Innovation Network (TWIN) building academic-industry (public-private) partnerships. TWIN will be a collaboration among our SCORE institutions and the Innovation Center on Sex Differences in Medicine (ICON- X) at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH-primary site of the SCORE). The SCORE TWIN will: 1) Create new knowledge steeped in sex differences in brain, heart and gut that incorporates critical skills required for biomedical innovation management; 2) Enable its transfer into products, processes, and systems to improve mental and physical health; 3) Improve workforce innovation management; 4) Increase biomedical workforce diversity, in particular women in STEM leadership; and 5) Create a sustainable infrastructure that can be used as a prototype for other training programs. The aims are to: Extend CEC programs & develop curricula to create academic-industry partnerships where trainees will learn to identify and protect intellectual property and translate knowledge of sex differences in the brain and heart into diagnostic tools and therapies; Create multi- level mentoring groups to establish a next generation community of academic women and men and cross- sector mentoring/coaching teams who will encourage open exchange of ideas, career advancement, and problem solving to address development of sex-selective diagnostic tools and therapies for depression and comorbid cardiometabolic diseases; Provide seed funding to supplement and extend basic and clinical science studies to infuse industry knowledge to make the development process more efficient; and Disseminate findings to publicize our model system enabling knowledge transfer from academia to industry and back to academia that incorporates the impact of sex. Our trainees will be ambassadors for creating a more informed, translationally focused workforce among other SCOREs and training programs. This training will take advantage of greater participation of women and under-represented populations in STEM to enhance discovery and product development for mental health.