The WSU Integrated Research Labs (WiRL) initiative is concentrated on building a unique, centrally organized technical service pipeline under the Office of the Vice President for Research. The major goals of WiRL are to promote WSU-centric clinical and translational research, and to support and enhance research collaboration and implementation. The broad focus includes precision medicine, health disparity and environmental health science areas, among which human-based biomarker discovery, validation, development and implementation are pivotal components. This effort will be additive to the existing business of various core labs, but is dedicated to promote unique and innovative technology development, as well as to generate and foster collaborative project-based services encompassing multiple labs, rather than focusing on module-based single technique service in each lab. A centralized service pipeline requires strong collaboration among all core labs as a team, and needs highly efficient management, project design and work allocation. It is anticipated that such an effort will be able to serve as a window to mediate and transduce the collaborative requests from both internal and external researchers, thus efficiently incubating and fostering collaboration between clinical, basic science and industrial partners. More importantly, it is recognized that this united approach will foster unique strength to make WSU facilities and cores more competitive with external resources and commercial services.

WiRL Design and Model

The WiRL pipeline will be built upon the integration of different expertise and specialized experience and strengths of WSU, while also leveraging existing resources and infrastructures (e.g. various core labs, CSRC, WSU biobank, etc.) without further requesting monetary support. The overarching goal is to create a "one-stop-for-all" service pipeline to support the campus-wide, regional and even national needs for translational biomarker discovery, development and validation. This effort will broadly serve academic, clinical and industrial researchers and collaborators. The initiative will include the following components:

• WSU Biobank - house in IBio under the CSRC
• Discovery core labs - involves all established university core labs (genomics, proteomics, Lumigen, Imaging, Lipidomics, etc.)
• Biomarker Discovery and Development Laboratory (BDDL) - includes two labs at IBio: the Biomarker Development Lab and the pharmacogenomics resource laboratory.
• CLIA-Certified Clinical Research Lab (CRL) - The CRL will support ongoing and prospective clinical research related to biomarker-based diagnostic information collection, utilization and implementation. This will help clinical trials that currently have to outsourceCLIA-required research activities currently not available at Wayne State.
• Community Advisory Board (CAB) and Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) - The CAB oversees decisions regarding the use of bioband samples, and provides direct connection to community members for sample data collection as well as collaborative opportunities. The SAB orchestrates the research activities of the entire WiRL pipeline in terms of the use of the biobank.