The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has renewed the National University of Natural Medicine’s (NUNM) Helfgott Research Institute grant to continue its Building Research Across Interdisciplinary Gaps (BRIDG) Clinical Research Training Program for another five years.
The grant renewal will be approximately $3.275 million over its five-year cycle. NIH first funded the program in 2015. The approval for renewed funding allows Helfgott to continue training doctoral-level scientists in clinical research related to complementary and integrative health (CIH), including naturopathic and Chinese medicine disciplines.
The BRIDG Clinical Research Training Program in Complementary and Integrative Health is underway in collaboration with the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle. Since 2015, the research program has been awarded a total of $2.4 million. This new award will bring the total to just under $6 million in grant funding over the 10-year program.
The goal of the BRIDG program is to cross-train promising investigators to translate CIH (formerly known as complementary and alternative medicine, or CAM) concepts into testable, multi-disciplinary research hypotheses; and to apply translational research methods to CIH-oriented research. Recognizing that research in CIH requires a multi-disciplinary approach, NUNM and UW have combined their expertise in research, clinical care and CIH to create an immersive clinical research training program that fosters inter-professional communication, collaboration and respect among a variety of medical and research disciplines.
The program integrates doctoral-level CIH health care providers (e.g., doctors of naturopathic, chiropractic, East Asian medicine, physical therapy and/or osteopathy) and conventionally trained researchers from biomedical and public health disciplines (e.g., medical doctors, doctors of public health, PhDs, etc.).
The NUNM component of the BRIDG program is training post-doctoral researchers who want to learn clinical research in a variety of CIH practices, including naturopathy, Chinese medicine, herbal medicine, nutrition, and mind-body therapies, with help from NUNM mentors. The UW program component is training post-doctoral CIH clinicians in a variety of clinical research methods, with UW mentors.
For more information, visit https://nunm.edu.
