Kansas University Medical Center announced last week it had received a three-year, nearly $7.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to find ways to more efficiently implement medical discoveries.

The field known as “translational research” involves taking a basic medical discovery and developing it so that it can be brought from the bench to the bedside, so to speak.

The grant will pay for research – including treatment trials in human subjects – in several disciplines at KU Medical Center.

In conjunction with the grant, KUMC also announced that it had created the Heartland Institute for Clinical and Translational Research to serve as an umbrella group for translational research. Richard Barohn, chairman of the department of neurology, is the director of the institute and Lauren Aaronson, professor of nursing, is deputy director.