Contents
News from NCRR
People, Awards, Grants, and New Developments
Five Members Appointed to NCRR Advisory Council
The National Advisory Research Resources Council advises NCRR on policies and programs and performs second-level peer review of grant applications. Five distinguished researchers and health administrators were recently appointed as new council members.
Nancy J. Brown (Photo courtesy of Vanderbilt University)
Nancy J. Brown, Robert H. Williams Professor of medicine and pharmacology and associate dean for clinical and translational scientist development in the School of Medicine, Vanderbilt University. Brown is nationally known for her research on blood pressure regulation. She is a founder and former director of the Master of Science in Clinical Investigation program and was recently recognized for her commitment to promoting research among young physicians.
Valerie Copie
Valerie Copie, associate professor of biochemistry at Montana State University. Copie’s investigations focus on the connection between a protein’s three-dimensional architecture and its biological function(s), the mechanism by which atomic structures and internal dynamics modulate biochemical activity, and the significance of conserved amino acid residues in protein families. Her approach involves multidimensional, heteronuclear, solution nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy along with complementary biophysical techniques.
Henry Lewis, III (Photo courtesy of Florida A&M University)
Henry Lewis, III, professor and director of research programs in the College of Pharmacy at Florida A&M University (FAMU). Lewis has previously served as dean of the College of Pharmacy at both FAMU and Texas Southern University and was interim president of FAMU. He also has been on the national advisory council of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences and was an NIH extramural associate. Lewis is currently the principal investigator for the Research Centers in Minority Institutions at FAMU. His area of research is sickle cell anemia.
Mark V. Pauly (Photo courtesy of University of Pennsylvania)
Mark V. Pauly, Bendheim Professor of health care systems, business and public policy, and insurance and risk management, Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and professor of economics, College of Arts and Sciences. Pauly was a commissioner on the Physician Payment Review Commission and is an active member of the Institute of Medicine. He was previously on the faculty of Northwestern University. Pauly has studied how health insurance coverage affects the use of various types of medical services and has been investigating ways to reduce the number of uninsured through tax credits and the appropriate design for Medicare in a budget-constrained environment.
Janet L. Smith (Photo courtesy of University of Michigan)
Janet L. Smith, Margaret J. Hunter Collegiate Professor of life sciences and professor of biological chemistry at the University of Michigan. Smith’s research focuses on understanding biological processes by determining the structures of key proteins. In particular, her work examines the structures of proteins from infectious pathogens, including the RNA viruses that cause West Nile, yellow fever, and dengue, and those involved in biosynthetic pathways for the polyketide family of secondary metabolites.
Rubenstein Receives Prestigious Award
Arthur H. Rubenstein, executive vice president of the University of Pennsylvania for the Health System and dean of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, received the 2007 Academic Health Centers Leadership Award from the Clinical Research Forum, an organization consisting of the nation’s leading academic health centers, for “his lifetime of leadership in academic clinical research.” In October 2006, the University of Pennsylvania, along with the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, received a $68 million Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) from NCRR. Prior to the CTSA, the university was home to an NCRR-funded General Clinical Research Center headed by Rubenstein.
Rubenstein has led the development of an aggressive scientific program to advance clinical and translational research at the University of Pennsylvania. The new Institute for Translational Medicine and Therapeutics, supported through the CTSA Program, is an interdisciplinary alliance, also involving the Wistar Institute, the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia, and eight other schools at Penn.
An internationally prominent endocrinologist, Rubenstein is recognized for his clinical expertise and groundbreaking research in diabetes. He has served as president of the Association of Professors of Medicine, the Association of American Physicians, and the Central Society for Clinical Research and has been chairman of both the American Board of Internal Medicine and the National Diabetes Advisory Board. Over the years, he has received several grants and awards from NCRR.
NIH Funds Repository for Knockout Mouse Project
NIH has awarded $4.8 million to the University of California, Davis, and Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute to establish and maintain a repository of up to 8,500 strains of mice in which certain genes have been made inoperable, or “knocked out.”
The grant is the final component of the NIH Knockout Mouse Project (KOMP), a trans-NIH initiative designed to increase the availability of genetically altered mice and related materials. The more than $50 million KOMP created the mouse embryonic stem cell lines—the types of cells that give rise to knockout mice—in which 8,500 different genes were knocked out.
The newly established repository will make knockout mice available to researchers as live mouse lines, embryonic stem cell clones, frozen embryos, and sperm. Researchers then will be able to study the mice to develop better models of many human diseases.
NCRR, the National Human Genome Research Institute, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases have funded the four-year grant to establish and operate the new repository. Previous KOMP awards established a data coordination center to track knockout mouse production and supported efforts to improve methods for creating knockout lines.
Information on the new repository and KOMP is available at www.komp.org.
Network Connects Investigators at Minority Institutions
NCRR will initially provide $9.5 million over three years to launch a network connecting researchers based at minority institutions and other collaborating institutions throughout the United States who are focused on studying and treating diseases that disproportionately affect minority populations.
The network will provide the necessary infrastructure and resources for facilitating multicenter, collaborative research that applies discoveries generated in the laboratory to clinical trials, as well as developing common practices in disease prevention and intervention in local communities. In particular, by providing informatics tools for analyzing and managing clinical research data, recruiting for clinical trials, and sharing information with patients, the network will enable researchers to collaborate more efficiently with each other and their communities.
The effort will be coordinated by Keith Norris, an expert in kidney disease at Charles R. Drew University in Los Angeles, Calif. In addition to Drew, participating institutions include Morehouse School of Medicine, Atlanta, Ga.; University of Hawaii, Honolulu, Hawaii; University of Puerto Rico Medical Sciences Campus, San Juan, Puerto Rico; Meharry Medical College, Nashville, Tenn.; Hunter College, City University of New York, N.Y.; and Howard University, Washington, D.C. Jackson State University, Jackson, Miss., will be the site of the Data and Technology Coordinating Center for the network.
These institutions are part of NCRR’s Research Centers in Minority Institutions program, which aims to enhance the research capacity and infrastructure at minority colleges and universities that offer doctorates in health and health-related sciences.
