Yale-TCC
Bringing Community-Based Participatory Research to the Caribbean
The Yale Transdisciplinary Collaborative Center for Health Disparities Research focused on Precision Medicine (Yale-TCC) is a collaboration among health, policy, research, and community leaders in Barbados, Puerto Rico, Trinidad & Tobago, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the United States. It builds upon the infrastructure and knowledge of the Eastern Caribbean Health Outcomes Research Network (ECHORN) to generate novel science, strengthen partnerships, and implement interventions to reduce the burden of non-communicable diseases in the Caribbean.
The TCC consortium is a network of representative members from more than 30 Caribbean health, policy, and community settings. Each member serves on one of our workgroups—collaborative learning, consortium well-being, data sharing, or implementation—to address long-standing disparities in hypertension and diabetes among African descent and Hispanic populations. Working together, consortium members identify research priorities, design studies, analyze and interpret results, share findings, and build their professional networks.
The consortium sponsors research studies that use precision medicine to address health disparities in diabetes and hypertension in the Caribbean. In LIME—Lifestyle Intervention with Metformin Escalation—a team of investigators is adapting and testing a lifestyle intervention to reduce the incidence of diabetes among high-risk patients. TCC also hosts two pilot projects—one examining hormones that may contribute to hypertension in African descent populations, and another assessing genetic variants that may affect patients' responses to metformin.
These efforts demonstrate Yale-TCC’s commitment to community-based participatory research, which has been widely recognized as essential to developing effective, sustainable interventions that improve health outcomes and reduce health disparities. Together, our members are making meaningful, impactful contributions to the health of their loved ones, their neighbors, and the greater Caribbean community.