Access to the Coronary Assessment in VA (CAVA) Cohorts
Cardiovascular diseases (CVD) are the leading cause of death globally, costing an estimated 17.9 million lives each year. CVD is caused mainly by atherosclerosis, a thickening or hardening of the arteries caused by a buildup of plaque in the inner lining. Importantly, inflammation is recognized as a key component of the disease. Atherosclerotic lesions contain various immune cells coupled with cholesterol infiltrates from the blood. While therapeutics targeting the immune response are currently the fastest growing class of drugs, the challenge of elucidating biomarkers and defining how best to deliver targeted patient-specific approaches remains. Our goal is to reduce barriers for investigators to perform cutting-edge research on cardiovascular diseases, and designate UVA as the premier location for targeting the immune-system for research, diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment of cardiovascular diseases.
Interested investigators should submit a proposal, detailed below, and submit to iprime-contact@virginia.edu.
Proposal Guidelines
- Please ensure all coauthors have seen and approved the proposal prior to submission.
- New proposals should be no more than 4 pages in length, excluding the references.
- 0.5-inch margins, 11-point Arial font, single-spaced.
- Submit as a singular PDF to iprime-contact@virginia.edu.
Proposal Format
- Project Title.
- Names of principal investigators, co-investigators, collaborators, and trainees to include departmental and school affiliations.
- Introduction: to include specifics on how CAVA Cohort biospecimens or clinical data will be used.
- Research Questions: to include the specific questions being addressed with the CAVA Cohort
- Preliminary Data: to include relevant data driving your access request.
- Analysis: to include your detailed approach for bioinformatics and/or statistical analysis.
- References.
Expectation to Utilize the Research Data Commons
With the aim of fostering a collaborative ecosystem we ask that data generated using CAVA biospecimens be added into the Research Data Commons. This research data infrastructure enables the safe, secure collection, storage, sharing and analysis of data. Access will be controlled by project principal investigators and various levels of personalized access can be established.