Forging stronger partnerships between academic health centers and patient-driven organizations.

In this article, the authors review the unique role that patient-driven organizations, such as patient advocacy groups and voluntary health organizations (PAG/VHOs), play in translational and clinical research. The importance of fostering collaborations between these organizations and U.S.

Commentary: recognizing and tracking philanthropy's critical support of health research.

Given the current fiscal climate limiting both government and industry support for health research, philanthropic support of health research is increasingly relevant because it provides some of the critical "risk capital" that stimulates innovation, helps translate basic research findings into clinical applications, helps support the career development of investigators, builds new infrastructure, and helps fill key funding gaps. Unfortunately, because of the philanthropic sector's diversity and scope, it is challenging to track the sector's health research investments. The authors briefly review the landscape of philanthropic organizations, identify several success stories resulting from philanthropic investments, and finally underscore the importance of gaining more knowledge about the sector through purposeful data collection efforts such as those of the Health Research Alliance (HRA), a consortium of nonprofit funders of biomedical research and training.

Launching a new fellowship for medical students: the first years of the Doris Duke Clinical Research Fellowship Program.

As part of its commitment to increasing the pipeline of physicians pursuing careers in clinical research, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation launched the Doris Duke Clinical Research Fellowship (CRF) Program for medical students in 2000. The program, which is based at 10 US medical schools, provides medical students from any US medical school with the opportunity to spend 1 year obtaining both didactic and "hands-on" mentored clinical research experience. This article describes the program and summarizes the early outcomes collected during the first 3.