“I think the way you get to be the best is by starting with the people, because it’s the talent that gets you there. Recruit and retain talented people; I think that’s one of the most important ingredients to getting to be the best.”
JOSEPH P. BRODERICK, MD Director, UC Gardner Neuroscience Institute
OUR INSTITUTE LEADERS AND CARE TEAMS ARE COMMITTED TO BEING THE BEST
The leadership team at the University of Cincinnati Gardner Neuroscience Institute has constructed a 10-year vision that will grow our areas of excellence in research, care and education. With your partnership, we will continue to lead the way—forging pathways to potential cures, growing our outreach and influence and constantly improving patient care—as one of the best neuroscience institutes in the nation.
This vision outlines our priority areas for philanthropic investments, including:
Recruitment and retention of the most sought-after talent.
Research focused on precision medicine and lifelong brain health.
The power of big data to enhance patient care outcomes.
Technology and services to connect patients to the right treatment at the right time, particularly for mental health care.
Excellence in education and staffing, building career pipelines to keep up with the growing needs of neurological and neurosurgical care.
We are honored to present our vision for your thoughtful consideration. With philanthropic investments from our grateful patients, community and business leaders, we will drive new discoveries and deliver personalized care across our institute, serving as a model for other academic medical centers.
RESEARCH
Growing and retaining top talent
At the UC Gardner Neuroscience Institute, our faculty leaders bring an evidence-based focus to everything we do. To attract rising-star researchers and expand our quests for discovery, we must evolve our resources to maintain the fast pace required for continual health care innovation.
Endowed chairs for clinical leadership and research faculty
Historically, endowed chairs were a want-to-have luxury, today they are a need-to-have tool in order for UC to be competitive with other nationally ranked academic medical centers. Chairs are essential to our ability to recruit and retain top talent among a competitive field of other neuroscience institutes. Establishing new chairs builds permanency and sustainability in our areas of excellence:
Clinical leadership to advance the subspecialty care areas of:
• Stroke
• Mood Disorder
• Anxiety
• Neurodegenerative Disease
• Parkinson’s & Alzheimer’s
• Epilepsy
• Traumatic Brain Injury
• Imaging
• Patient Outcomes
• Population Health
Neuroscience research chairs expand clinical trials and basic neuroscience research, to enable the discovery of new medications and treatments, and protect time for physicianscientists to balance patient care with research and teaching. An endowed research chair allows us to recruit new thought leaders or retain vital faculty and ensures continuity of important research efforts at the university.
Paired with our advanced facilities and research operations, endowed chairs will attract nationally and globally recognized faculty to the UC Gardner Neuroscience Institute. This accelerates the research and development of new treatments, all to directly benefit more patients.
Expanding research for improved outcomes
MRI research technology
MRI scans are now a key component of clinical research trials at the neuroscience institute—including in Parkinson’s disease, stroke, epilepsy, memory and mood disorders. Neuroimaging research allows a physician or researcher to evaluate a patient’s baseline or see how they respond to new medications or therapies. To support our robust research efforts, the institute is in need of a dedicated research scanner.
An MRI focused entirely on research, with staff trained in neuroinformatics and the latest imaging techniques, will broaden our discovery efforts across all specialty areas. The outpatient facility (that opened in 2019) was built to accommodate an additional MRI with researcher staffing space.
For example, the Cincinnati Cohort Biomarker Project, led by Alberto Espay, MD, involves a comprehensive collection of health data. It requires many MRI scans per year for its more than 800 study participants. With the evolution of personalized medicine our team now takes multiple images throughout a patient’s care journey to evaluate in real time how they are responding to medicine or therapies.
Research endowment fund
Neuroscience is the most prolific research area throughout the academic health center and the entire university. Creating a substantial research endowment will encourage further cross-disciplinary projects across departments and centers and can spark “high-risk/highreward” ideas that are less likely to find support through conventional grant funding.
Pilot grants are the mustard seeds of research. Their results lead to much larger grants from the National Institutes of Health and other external foundations.
For example, $925,000 in pilot grant funding from 2014 to 2020 resulted in $16,236,369 in monies from the government and external foundations—a 17 to 1 return on investment.
A research endowment fund is critical to progress and will allow investigators to pursue more novel, long-term and untested research projects, giving them the security to take the risks that will yield breakthrough discoveries right here in Cincinnati.
Research focused on precision medicine and lifelong brain health
New approaches to precision medicine are advancing our knowledge of age-related diseases, specifically in the areas of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease:
Alzheimer’s disease
Under the leadership of Rhonna Shatz, DO, Bob and Sandy Heimann Endowed Chair in Research and Education in Alzheimer’s Disease, the UC Memory Disorders Center is pioneering new approaches to neurodegenerative diseases by focusing on brain health at all stages of life.
Historically, patients have not had access to a comprehensive clinical diagnosis. Our center is unique—using a framework of cognitive assessments (like sleep and gait monitoring) in combination with the collection of biomarkers. This full picture gives patients and their families confidence to develop an individualized care plan.
Established research shows that more than 40 to 60% of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementia conditions can be prevented with attention to lifestyle, sleep and vascular risk factors beginning as early as childhood.
Our memory care team is partnering with primary care providers to standardize tracking data points in electronic medical records such as blood pressure, cholesterol, sleep and exercise. Using this data, our team can intervene when a patient displays a deviation in cognition. With early intervention and a preventative approach, we can make lifelong brain health a reality.
A significant multi-year investment to expand our research tools and recruit new faculty will drive personalized medicine in collaboration with our patients. This growth and expansion of our research and care approaches to Alzheimer’s and other memory disorders would position us for designation as an Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center (ADRC). The investment and resulting recognition and impact from an ADRC are similar to achieving National Cancer Institute designation—a best-in-class status—and are a key metric in rankings.
Parkinson’s disease
Led by Alberto Espay, MD, research endowed chair of the James J. and Joan A. Gardner Center for Parkinson's Disease and Movement Disorders, the Cincinnati Cohort Biomarker Program (CCBP) is tackling the diseases of brain aging from an ambitious new mindset, one that drops old definitions and lets the data guide and redefine a personalized medicine approach, beginning with Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.
Thanks to support from the Gardner Family Foundation, the CCBP study is the first of its kind—working to match a patient’s biology to treatments already available to slow or stop their disease. Dr. Espay and his team have already gathered health data points from thousands of patients, including genome sequencing and neuroimaging, in order to deploy principles of precision medicine in patients with Parkinson’s and other neurological diseases. This is similar to the evolution of cancer care and treatments, where physicians can now identify 20 different types of breast cancer and individualized treatment plans, as opposed to a single “cancer” diagnosis and treatment. Dr. Espay believes neuroscientists will soon be able to definitively diagnose, treat and cure a patient with Parkinson’s disease based on their unique biological markers.
In a Buenos Aires-Cincinnati collaboration, over a period of four years, the CCBP has uncovered the genetic causes of approximately 30% of 341 enrolled patients.
Technology and services
As our patient outcomes continue to excel, new technology and comprehensive services in support of the whole person will evolve across the institute.
Our current priorities include:
• New neurosurgical technology, like the O-armTM, a 2D/3D imaging system that can reduce the risk of complications and shorten recovery time for a variety of spinal and cranial surgical procedures.
• Software to improve the patient journey, upgrading our ability to seamlessly communicate with patients.
• Brain health longevity program to offer in-depth neurological assessments for signature world-class preventative care.
• Integrative medicine and survivorship clinics offered by the Osher Center for Integrative Health at UC, providing complementary therapies like wellness classes for nutrition, mindfulness and exercise.
EDUCATION
Building excellence in care, training, specialized staffing
In the hospital setting, talented nurses, resident physicians and support staff, often spend more time with patients and families than the attending physicians. These expert care teams provide compassionate, research-driven care to the bedside—and are a key component to becoming the neuroscience institute by which all others are measured.
Nursing endowment and expansion of programs
The demand for neuroscience nurses is high, due in part to an aging patient population and a growing rate of neurologic conditions, paired with a national nursing shortage. This high demand is also due to the extensive and ongoing requirements for continual, progressive education and skills training that nurses need to provide care in the neurological specialty and stay abreast of evolving advances and technologies.
An endowment fund will build opportunities for nurses to train, advance and contribute to the science of neurological care, further positioning our institute as a national leader in treating complex neurological problems.
Investments in nursing education within UC and area schools will grow the pipeline of passionate, skilled nurses, as well as help talent retention. Additional investments will enhance our ability to support nurses with patient mobility and ambulation, technology improvements and continuing education.
Fellowship positions
One-year post-graduate training programs provide the opportunity to advance in a subspecialty area of neurological care. Fellowship positions will include MDs but also extend to opportunities for physician assistants and nurse practitioners who wish to pursue specialized training. Fellows will work in outpatient, inpatient and ICU settings across all subspecialty areas of clinical neurology and neurosurgery.
MEASURES
OF SUCCESS
Philanthropic support will speed our time to impact in the areas of research, patient care and training the next generation. We will track and measure our success in these areas through improved scores and metrics in:
Research
Our research portfolio will grow and be measured by: the number of publications in top level journals, faculty presentations at conferences, and scores/rankings from the National Institutes of Health and Blue Ridge Rankings. Additionally, we will track membership growth in premier research networks such as StrokeNET, Mood Disorders and the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Centers (ADRCs).
Clinical
Investments into personalized medicine and clinical advancements will be measured by: improving patient outcomes (relevant to a patient’s quality of life including symptoms, functionality, and physical, mental and social health), impacting key hospital metrics like decreasing mortality and re-admissions rates, and improving patient safety and satisfaction. These will additionally support our reputation rankings in mass media outlets like U.S. News and World Report.
Education
Being a destination for complex neurological care also means being a destination for the best and brightest talent—from students pursuing our residency and specialty fellowship programs to new clinicians and researchers. As demand increases for limited spots (for example, hundreds of fellowship applicants for 10 openings), so will competitiveness and the strength of applicants, along with the quality of care and research across the institute. Professional physician networks like Doximity and professional organizations like Association of American Medical Colleges will help us measure this.
