Pilot/Exploratory Studies Core
Key Accomplishments
Past and Current Projects
Available Resources
Key Personnel

Overview
The overall goals of the Pilot/Exploratory Studies Core (P/ESC) are to foster the Johns Hopkins Older Americans Independence Center's (OAIC) objectives by cultivating and supporting cutting-edge pilot and exploratory studies that will advance the development of effective prevention and/or therapies for frailty.

This Core sets scientific goals for the next stages of frailty research in collaboration with the Leadership Council (see Leadership and Administrative Core). The P/ESC then works to identify investigators whose expertise and career goals are applicable to furthering our knowledge in these target areas, and fosters their development of high-impact pilot studies, their conduct, and eventual translation.

Overall, the Core accomplishes its goals by funding and shepherding to completion and translation pilot studies of novel, hypothesis-driven research that a) establishes potential mechanisms, etiologies, screening approaches or evaluations of potential therapies to prevent or ameliorate the syndrome of frailty, and b) establishes preliminary data in these areas that will lead to substantive, lon-term external funding that can bring this research to completion.

Building on these overarching goals, the specific aims of P/ESC are to:

• Advance the science and translation of the field of frailty research by providing intellectual leadership to a) identify areas of research with the potential for developing interventions that prevent or treat frailty, b) identify new and established investigators with the potential to make significant contributions to the study of frailty, and encourage and guide them to develop pilot proposals.
• Support development of optimal pilot proposals, including ensuring optimal utilization of the intellectual and other resources offered by other Older Americans Independence Center (OAIC) cores, as needed.
• Provide and conduct longitudinal mentorship from conception to translation for investigators whose pilot proposals are supported by the OAIC. This begins with mentorship for the development of well designed, hypothesis-testing and hypothesis-generating proposals that fit within a pilot project framework and helping the awardee understand how the project fits into the corpus of research into frailty. This also involves facilitating successful, timely completion of projects, helping resolve problems as they arise during the course of the research, supporting participation in OAIC seminars and RIPs, and guiding the awardee in developing follow-up aims and hypotheses as the basis for seeking independent funding and translation of research.
        Specifically, the P/ESC will help awardees establish a timeline for each project, set expectations for high productivity, monitor progress toward the established goals, make optimal adaptations to this timeline when research challenges arise, and require that the awardee prepare brief reports every four months during the P/ESC support period describing progress made, obstacles encountered and strategies proposed to overcome these challenges.
• Increase the visibility of frailty as an important topic by bringing it to the attention of individuals with the potential to contribute to the study of frailty by helping awardees present their research at local and national forums, by placing awardees in contact with other individuals at Johns Hopkins and nationally whose interests intersect with the topic they are researching, by encouraging discussion of frailty and the potential application of the pilot studies supported in clinical, epidemiological and basic science forums throughout the medical institutions, on clinical services, at specialty society meetings, in public health settings and through high productivity of awardees.
  
• Guide the translation of pilot work into a deeper understanding of the basic biology of frailty (top down) and into interventions that will prevent or treat frailty (bottom up) by discussing the potential translation of pilot projects to future studies during the development, course and completion of the project, and in OAIC seminars. Foster communication and collaboration between awardees and participants in other OAIC cores to further encourage translation.