The Medical City launches its research agenda and facility

As healthcare professionals, are you doing enough for your patients? Does the unknown scare you? Are you ready to rediscover patient care?

While medical treatment has made astonishing advances over the years, there are still a lot of unmet medical needs of patients and still so much more to discover and uncover with regard to clinical practice. Thus, research is essential to find answers to things that are unknown, filling gaps in knowledge and changing the way that healthcare professionals work. 

With the goal of being not just a world-class hospital but also an exemplary research institution, The Medical City (TMC) on March 25, 2021, launched the new programs and facility of the Clinical and Translational Research Institute (CTRI) which is at the forefront of bridging the clinical research gap from the laboratory setting to its bedside application.

Established in 2017, the CTRI is committed to cultivate the different aspects of research and to interconnect the different TMC enterprise hospitals, making research an integral part of the values and brand of The Medical City across the country. 

The CTRI Research Facility is composed of the Clinical Trial Facility and the Biomedical Research Laboratories (The BRU Labs). The Clinical Trial Facility is the one-stop-shop facility of the Clinical Trial Unit which caters to various clinical trial services like patient examination (in two dedicated clinical trial rooms), clinical trial monitoring (in a dedicated and equipped monitoring area), and trial file storage (in dedicated and secured investigational site file storage room). 

The CTU continues to live with its commitment to provide an efficient and high quality research management system catering to the needs of the clinician trialist and biomedical researchers. The Medical City is now recognized in the industry as a multi-center clinical trial site that enjoins TMC Main, TMC Iloilo, TMC Clark, TMC South Luzon, and soon, TMC Pangasinan. This makes The Medical City a multi-center clinical trial site. The CTU is headed by Edgar R. Dimaguila.

On the other hand, the BRU Labs are top-of-the-line laboratory facilities that cater to the conduct of basic scientific research through its state-of-the-art equipment and expert collaborations locally and internationally. The BRU Labs offer TMC researchers access to a tissue culture facility for mammalian tissue sample propagation, bioanalytical laboratory for basic biochemical analysis, instrumentation facility (with Ultra-Performance Liquid Chromatography) for chemical detection and purification, molecular biology facility for basic nucleic acid purification, quantification, amplification, analysis, and library preparation for sequencing, 3D printing facility for manufacturing of polymer-based materials, 3D bioprinting facility for organoid or tissue printing, and biobanking facility (with -20 and -80 degrees Celsius freezers). 

“We plan to offer the first integrated research facility that can cater to the needs of researchers, from the basic benchtop research, to clinical trials, up until research translation to the patients,” said Dr. Roland Gilbert Remenyi, head of BRU.     

The virtual launch featured messages from Dr. Remenyi, Mr. Dimaguila, and Mark Carascal, Science Research Specialist; reveal of the BRU Labs research agenda; simulation activities in the Clinical Trial Facility; lab walkthrough; update on the groundbreaking Physician Scientist Fellowship Program, and a fireside chat between TMC President and CEO Dr. Eugenio Jose F. Ramos and multi-awarded clinician and scientist Dr. Raul V. Destura, head of CTRI.

The CTRI Clinical Trial Facility and the Biomedical Research Laboratories (The BRU Labs) are located at the Lower Ground of The Medical City in Ortigas, Pasig City. For more information, please call 8-9881000 ext. 7834.