Postgraduate - UnitTRM4002 - Translational research

This unit entry is for students who completed this unit in 2015 only. For students planning to study the unit, please refer to the unit indexes in the the current edition of the Handbook. If you have any queries contact the managing faculty for your course or area of study.

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6 points, SCA Band 3, 0.125 EFTSL

Refer to the specific census and withdrawal dates for the semester(s) in which this unit is offered.

Level	Postgraduate
Faculty	Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences
Offered	Alfred Hospital First semester 2015 (Off-campus block of classes) Monash Medical Centre Second semester 2015 (Off-campus block of classes)
Coordinator(s)	Dr Steven Petratos

Synopsis

Translational research is a growing and exciting new discipline in medicine that deals with the development of fundamental scientific findings into tangible clinical outcomes. Translational researchers are involved in identifying a worthwhile scientific finding that can be applied to a clinical setting. Along this research and development pipeline are a series of critical check-points that provide the investigator vital tools to generate a valuable result that has merit for translation. This unit will establish a fundamental knowledge in the processes involved in developing a basic science finding through to clinical studies. The unit provides workshop-based learning in the development of discipline-specific laboratory research questions and how they are applied to broader clinical applications. The main focus of this unit is to identify how fundamental scientific questions may have multidisciplinary clinical answers. Other core learning outcomes are through understanding how scientific concepts can be marketed and communicated effectively through research pipeline procedures and the responsibilities of the researcher that may be derived from this.

Outcomes

Upon successful completion of this unit, students should be able to:

Outline commercialisation procedures through Licensing, Intellectual Property and patents.
Define the rules of engagement in contract research projects with companies, organisations or government agencies.
Describe the current trends in protein production for pharmaceutical research and clinical applications.
Outline the engineering principle for scale-up, production and purification (upstream and downstream) steps and list the preferred industrial practices including monitoring of processes, product purity and quality.
Recall the utility and accessibility of key technologies that may be incorporated into a Translational Research Project.
Define the principles of mouse colony management and genetic modification.
Outline the current legal and regulatory basis of biobanking, its importance in translational research, how to access banked material and how to manage the data generated.
Recognizing how to talk about your research to the media.

Assessment

Essay 1: Intellectual property & commercialisation (1,500 words) (25%)
Essay 2: Bioprocessing/bioinformatics/biobanking/bioimaging/phenomics (1,500 words) (25%)
Media release - executive summary (500 words) (10%)
Online self-directed learning tasks (6 x 5% = 30%)
Online test (1 hour) (10%)

Workload requirements

On-campus: This unit will be delivered as an intensive 1 week program with a total of 24 hours of face-to-face teaching, including lecture and tutorial workshop time. The remaining 10 hours per week (Over 12 week period) is made up of private study time completing on-line exercises, modules and 1 major assignment to be submitted at the end of semester.

Chief examiner(s)

Dr Steven Petratos

Prerequisites

Students need to have completed and passed a minimum of 96 credit points in an undergraduate Science Discipline programme prior to enrolling in this unit.