 Hi, so I'm going to tell you a little bit about the Strategic Opportunity Support Program. I'm Melanie Funes, and I'm really lucky to be able to work with Dan Loenstein, our director, and with our incredibly talented program coordinator, Ms. Juliet Faulkler, who should be recognized for her immense contributions to this presentation. So what is SOS? The Strategic Opportunity Support Program is CTSI's pilot funding program. We issue about $1 million per year in research support to UCF faculty at all schools. We have 14 different grant mechanisms which span from pilots to technology to shared instrument, multidisciplinary, multi-center, and career development. What I want to talk to you a little bit about today is two ways in which we've had an impact at UCSF, and then ways in which we impact the community beyond UCSF. So at UCSF, we've contributed to building infrastructure. SOS initiated the Resource Allocation Program, or RAP. RAP actually brings together all of the funding agencies on campus. It simplifies intramural funding by providing an announcement, one application and one deadline, a single process for review and a funding decision. It increases, it has increased the research support at the university by working together all of these nine funding agencies. In the last year, RAP issued about $3.5 million and 119 awards. And over their span, they've issued actually over $12 million. RAP, although it was initiated at CTSI, became a campus-wide resource and it recently moved to the EVC's office. We've also impacted research funding here at UCSF. In the first five years of CTSI, we issued $5.5 million and 183 awards. $3.9 million in the first four years was issued to support research, and that subsequently led to the recruitment of $44 million of research funding. When faculty were asked what the role of SOS was in recruiting funding, they responded with, it was critical, it was crucial, it was essential, it was invaluable. I put up this quote from this faculty member who says that the SOS support was absolutely essential toward their efforts to obtain subsequent funding. But not just that, it's, without this support, it's entirely possible that I would have converted to a clinical role or left UCSF. So how do we impact beyond UCSF? I want to tell you about three specific examples, particularly dealing with policy standards of care and therapeutics. So just in short, one of the examples that deals with standards of care is an award that SOS gave for what's commonly known as bubble boy disease. Obviously, you know, we're one of many contributors towards the success of these programs. We're not trying to take, you know, full credit. Ultimately, this investment led to the faculty member being able to recruit $4.4 million to establish some really huge partnerships that led to a statewide newborn screening program. The infants identified with SCID are actually treated here at UCSF. And recently, this became statewide legislature. It now is added to the list of diseases that California newborns are routinely screened for when they're born. A second example is prostate cancer. In this case, a faculty member was given an SOS award to look at a molecular imaging technique. As it turned out, this molecular imaging technique could be used as a companion biomarker to therapy commonly used in treating prostate cancer. They were able to recruit $4 million in NIH funding, and this agent is actually right now in phase one clinical trials here at UCSF. And the final example that I want to talk to you about deals with policy, and in particular, sodium intake and coronary heart disease. Dr. Bibbins Domingo was awarded $30,000 from SOS to look at adapting the coronary heart disease policy model to address disparities in heart disease. She developed a new version of this model and was able to use this new version in subsequent studies with the most major one being published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2010, which tells us that reducing daily salt intake can reduce deaths by coronary heart disease at an average of 75,000 people per year. It influenced policy guidelines on sodium intake and was published in the Institute of Medicine's guidelines on strategies to reduce sodium intake in the United States. So with that, I'll just say thank you. So thank you, Melanie. I just want to clarify, so that's a 12-fold ROI on the investment in SOS? Roughly, yeah. And those are additional funds that they attribute to getting the small grant? Yes, that's correct. Okay, good. David, do you want to start us out? Well, one of the things, as I'm hearing the word strategic, you've got different cores that are within the CTSI. So we're hearing about recruitment core and we're hearing about the clinical core overall. And as I'm listening to that, I'm just wondering if part of the thinking is the strategy of using the different cores and facilitating what's going on. So there's some pilot funds. Is there thinking with the people about how other services may be used in thinking of their work as a pipeline? Absolutely. So SOS actually has a CRS award that we partner with CRS to offer to the community. And that includes funding for faculty members to use towards research that they're going to do in the CRS group, but also I think in other areas. Yeah, and is Julie Auger here? Yeah, so and we're working with Julie specifically on a plan that does what you just said. So to provide small grants to people to allow them to use cores across campus. Talmage. The small grant idea is a wonderful one that often it doesn't support salary, doesn't support salary or not. And usually, the people who have the bright idea are the ones with no money. I wonder how. So Melanie. So SOS awards actually do allow for salary. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, plus we've been putting a lot of energy into getting other grants for junior investigators. So, you know, those K numbers that I showed you, I mean, that's real. That's a lot of work to support those. And those are the ones with no money, with good ideas who really need that launching. All right, Sam. Yeah, I think the RAP program is just a great testament to what the CTSI was able to do in its first cycles, bringing disparate groups together across campus to come up with a cohesive funding model. I was wondering about where you're thinking is in terms of where do we go next with this? Because I think in the early phases, you really did consolidate all the available funds. And now are we just in a maintenance, making sure they're used well? Or where are you thinking about taking this to further. Expand this idea? So there's two things. So yes, we're in a maintenance mode of making sure that the awards that are offered continue to be offered. But the second thing is that SOS can actually be used as a platform on which other programs can build new awards. So we're currently working with BMI to add another award for M Health. And I suspect that in the future we'll continue to collaborate with all the programs across CTSI and across the university to offer new funding opportunities. Have we reached outside in an explicit way the university to foundations or industry or anyone else to contribute to try to make the pot bigger? No, not for SOS specifically, but we should. I guess it's worth putting out that since it's now in my office, it's sort of like our responsibility to do that. For RAP, yeah. Yeah, I think that's what we're talking about, RAP. And so we've actually started reaching out to industry to see whether some of the funds that come in there could be put into a pot for that. We've talked to a variety of organizations. We're just now, because we've just taken it over, but I think your point's perfect. We need to use this great start and now see if we can expand the pool. Yeah, and actually we have been doing that too outside of the traditional grant program. So you'll hear later about the T1 Calis program, for example. And that's one that's where we have a lot of interest from industry to co-fund it. So yeah, foundations is another place too. Already there are some donations from foundations that go to specific awards within RAP, and that could increase over time as well.