Digestive Diseases News
Winter 2007

Research News

NIH Awards $117 Million to Bolster Biomedical Research

Multidisciplinary Centers to Study Liver Disease, Obesity, Diabetes

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) will fund two new Centers of Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE) to study liver disease, and obesity and diabetes as part of the Institutional Development Award (IDeA) program, an initiative designed to improve investigator competitiveness in states that have been historically underfunded for competitive NIH research.

A new COBRE at Louisiana State University’s Pennington Biomedical Research Center will concentrate on obesity and diabetes, and the University of Kansas Medical Center will investigate liver disease. The NIH National Center for Research Resources (NCRR), which awards the funds, also will support new centers at the University of Mississippi to conduct neuroscience research and at the University of Vermont and State Agricultural College to examine infectious pathogens.

Leveraging Investments

“The investigators in IDeA states are successfully leveraging NIH’s investment by attracting additional funding and expanding their research endeavors,” said NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni, M.D. “By building on NIH’s support, they are also accelerating the pace of research discoveries by making significant contributions to a range of complex health issues, such as increasing our understanding of liver function, the immune system’s response to infectious pathogens, and the prevention of heart failure.”

Each COBRE includes a principal investigator with established credentials relevant to the center’s research theme; three to five individual research projects that share that theme and are supervised by a single junior investigator; and a development and mentoring plan that will prepare these investigators to secure competitive federal research funding.

Projects that will receive continued funding after competitive review include: immunological research at Dartmouth Medical School; cardiovascular investigations at the Medical University of South Carolina; the study of microbial pathogens at the University of Kansas Medical Center; investigations of the central nervous system at the University of New Mexico; neuroscience research projects at the University of Wyoming and the University of Vermont College of Medicine; and cancer studies at West Virginia University.

Visit the NCRR website at www.ncrr.nih.gov/resinfra/ri_idap.asp for more information about the IDeA program and COBRE awards.

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NIH Publication No. 07–4552
March 2007