The National Institutes of Health has awarded Virginia Commonwealth University a seven-year, $27 million grant to provide new therapy techniques “to the community” and to reduce regional health disparities.

On Tuesday, VCU announced the grant that will renew funding for its C. Kenneth and Dianne Wright Center for Clinical and Translational Research, which focuses on research and training to grow community engagement in that research, and increasing diversity in their patients and researchers in the workforce.

VCU officials said The Wright Regional Center works in clinical and translational science research and practice, integrating research, providing training to grow community engagement in research, diversifying patient populations, encouraging greater diversity among new clinician researchers entering the workforce and engaging in cutting-edge research in informatics.

The NIH grant is the largest the university has received from the organization, according to VCU officials.

“The new award will allow us to pursue the vision of the Wright Regional CCTS,” said F. Gerard Moeller, director of the Wright Center and associate vice president of the division of clinical research. He added that the grant will assist the university as it seeks “to advance health equity through translational science that actively engages diverse communities, trains a diverse research workforce and supports the rapid implementation of in- novative clinical and translational science within the Wright Regional CCTS and throughout the national program.”

The Wright Center is part of the VCU Office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation, led by P. Srirama Rao, Ph.D., who, in a news release, called the renewal a recognition of VCU’s strength and impact in clinical and translational science research area as well as its focus on reducing health disparities. (VCU officials confirmed that Dr. P. Srirama Rao is not related to VCU President Michael Rao.)

“Through this renewal, VCU will continue its efforts with transformative innovation, discoveries, training and ongoing overall impact on improving health disparities, new knowledge creation and patient care across our campuses,” said Dr. P. Srirama Rao. “It’s opportunities for collaboration and the valuable training to the next generation of clinician-researchers will have a tremendous, positive impact on our community, the region and beyond.”

In recent years, Wright Center researchers showed that there was an increase in deaths from causes other than COVID-19 during the pandemic that disproportionately affected Black patients; developed innovative technology-driven methods to engage low-income housing residents in virtual community advisory boards; established innovative tools to process and analyze community-based health data to address health inequities; and was selected to join an NIH project to enroll one million Americans to understand how biology, lifestyle and environment affect health across a diverse group of individuals.

As part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, NIH is the nation’s medical research and is the largest source of funding for medical research in the world, creating hundreds of thousands of high-quality jobs, according to its website.