Tammy Collins, Innovation in Regulatory Science Awards (IRSA) Program cover art

Tammy Collins, Innovation in Regulatory Science Awards (IRSA) Program

Tammy Collins, Innovation in Regulatory Science Awards (IRSA) Program

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Summary
 FOCUS In Sound #33: Tammy Collins, Innovation in Regulatory Science Awards (IRSA) Program Welcome to FOCUS In Sound, the podcast series from the FOCUS newsletter published by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. I’m your host, science writer Ernie Hood. In this edition of FOCUS In Sound, we meet one of the newest members of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund family, Program Officer Dr. Tammy Collins, who joined the Fund in October 2022. Tammy leads the Fund’s efforts in interdisciplinary science, including the Career Awards at the Scientific Interface and the Innovation in Regulatory Science Awards, which we will focus on for this edition of Focus in Sound. Tammy spent the past decade at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences as its director of the NIEHS Office of Fellows’ Career Development. She received her B.S. in Chemistry from Appalachian State University and her Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Duke University. After a brief postdoc at Duke, she joined NIEHS in 2009, where she developed her passion for working in the scientific career development field. Tammy Collins, welcome to the Fund, and to FOCUS In Sound … TAMMY: Thanks, I’m glad to be here. ERNIE: After so many years in government service mentoring fellows in their career development, what led you to shift your own career development path to the philanthropic sector by joining the Fund? TAMMY: Well, I’m glad that you asked that. So actually, part of my previous role included mentoring fellows on how to apply for grants, including the K99-R00. So I was really excited when I learned about this opportunity at Burroughs Wellcome Fund, where I was still going to get the chance to mentor individuals through the grant process. Specifically, postdocs, with one of the other programs that I oversee, and then faculty. So I’ll be able to learn new skills in mentoring faculty with the Innovations in Regulatory Science program. And in terms of moving from government service to the philanthropic sector, I still see that I am working in the service sector and still providing a service, just in a different avenue. And I’m really excited about being able to have a broad impact in science as it relates to a wide variety of areas, both with the Career Awards at the Scientific Interface as well as the Innovations in Regulatory Science. So I’m excited about those aspects of my work at Burroughs Wellcome Fund. ERNIE: So you didn’t even have to relocate, did you? TAMMY: I didn’t, and actually NIEHS is less than four miles down the road from Burroughs Wellcome Fund, on the same road. So I’m still here in Research Triangle Park. ERNIE: Well Tammy, to get us started on our discussion about regulatory science, would you give us a definition of the field, and tell us why the Fund invests in the sector? TAMMY: Yeah. That’s a question I have gotten a lot of times. People asking, “What is regulatory science?” So regulatory science has actually been defined as the science of developing new tools, standards, and approaches to assess the safety, efficacy, quality, and performance of FDA-regulated products. And Burroughs Wellcome Fund recognizes that regulatory science is a very important field, and it’s often an underserved area of research in the biomedical enterprise. And oftentimes what’s seen is that in translating or moving scientific discoveries into actual interventions that are going to help patients or therapeutic interventions, the regulatory science aspect is often what results in a bottleneck. And so what we want to do is actually help to close the innovation gap in creating new evaluative tools for new emerging technologies, and to do that in a wide variety of areas. We call out some of them in the RFP, but some of the things we’re looking at are specifically in gene therapy, artificial intelligence and machine learning, digital health, model-informed product development, and new technologies that might help to reduce animal testing. So these are just calling out a few areas, but really the field is wide open in terms of any individual that’s going to be helping to advance the field of regulatory science. ERNIE: Let’s look at the Innovation in Regulatory Science Awards, or IRSA. The awards program is going into its tenth year in 2023. Would you give us a brief overview of the IRSA program? TAMMY: The IRSA program, or the Innovation in Regulatory Science Awards, it supports faculty over a period of five years, and the total award amount is for $500,000. And one of the key things is that we want to support researchers who are developing innovative solutions to solve regulatory questions. And another thing that’s key is we want these solutions to actually be implementable. So when individuals are applying for the IRSA program, we would like for them to address how they expect their solutions are going to expedite the regulatory decision-making process. ERNIE: What types of researchers has it attracted in its existence? ...
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