Emory School of Medicine had 13 departments ranked among the top 20 in NIH support last year. The Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, a joint department between Emory School of Medicine and the Georgia Institute of Technology, was a leader nationally among biomedical engineering departments in NIH funding. Less than a decade old, the young Emory/Georgia Tech department garnered $8.6 million, more than double the amount received the previous year.
Increased research funding already is paying off big-time in expanded programs and research achievements.
This substantial and growing support from the NIH and other funding agencies has been essential to turning vision and energy—abundantly present at Emory—into groundbreaking research and advances in medical science. The state of Georgia also has been generous in its support of research at Emory through the Georgia Research Alliance and through the Georgia Cancer Coalition.
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Emory and Georgia Tech also received an earlier NIH grant of $11.5 million to use nanotechnology to analyze cardiovascular plaque formation at the molecular level and to detect it at its earliest stages.
Most recently, the NIH and the Georgia Research Alliance awarded shared grants that could total as much as $10 million over five years to Georgia Tech, Emory, and the Medical College of Georgia to create a center to study DNA repair.
The vaccine center also recently received a $4.5 million grant for its work in vaccine adjuvants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Collaboration for AIDS Vaccine Discovery.
The vaccine center is also partnering with an agency founded by the World Health Organization in New Delhi, India, the International Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, to develop and help move vaccines from the laboratory through the complex testing, approval, and manufacturing process to local health centers in Indian towns and villages hard hit by HIV.
Vaccines against hepatitis C—A $12.5 million grant from the Grand Challenges in Global Health Initiative, also funded by the Gates Foundation, recognizes the promise of a new immunologic blockade strategy developed at the Emory Vaccine Center to reduce the staggering health and economic impact of hepatitis C. The most common bloodborne viral disease in the United States, hepatitis C affects 170 million people worldwide, with little treatment available in the developing world.
Working with the immune-suppressed—A longstanding collaboration between the directors of the Emory Transplant Center and the Emory Vaccine Center is so productive that the NIH sometimes calls for relationship advice to pass on to other less amicably functioning research teams. This year, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases awarded $10 million to the team, in collaboration with the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, to develop new vaccine strategies that can better protect organ transplant recipients and other immune-suppressed patients from threats of infectious disease.
The NIH wants to know how to protect these severely immunosuppressed patients—and the rapidly expanding groups of patients with immune systems partially suppressed by chronic viral or autoimmune diseases or by chemotherapy—from the triple threats of bioterrorism, emerging infectious diseases, and the ever-present possibility of a new influenza pandemic. Immunosuppressed people also represent a sizeable hole in any national and global containment strategies against bioterrorism or emerging infectious disease.
Emory's transplant team is a world leader in developing and testing improved immunosuppressant drugs, first in primates at Yerkes and then in humans, to help patients better tolerate transplanted organs or tissue. These drugs block the body's immune response more selectively than traditional immunosuppressive drugs and with less toxicity.
Drug
development
When
the NIH decided to fund a national network of molecular screening centers,
able to screen hundreds of thousands of compounds against protein targets
using high-throughput robotics equipment, Emory was already up and running
with its own screening lab. An Emory University Chemical-Biology Discovery
Center, made up of faculty from the departments of pharmacology and chemistry
and from the Winship Cancer Institute, placed Emory squarely on the front
line of academic drug screening. Emory's history in successful AIDS
drug discovery and a track record of collaboration between the medical
school and the university's chemistry department also gave Emory
a leg up in the selection process for the new NIH screening center.
Last year, Emory was designated one of nine new centers in the NIH Molecular Libraries Screening Center Network, with a grant of $9 million, including a library of 100,000 molecular compounds, almost doubling the number already available at Emory.
One protein now under study at Emory enables cell-to-cell communication that triggers cancer oncogenes. Another interacts with the BRCA1 protein involved in breast cancer. Finding compounds to inhibit these proteins could prevent or slow the growth of tumors.
Last year, Emory was designated one of nine new centers in the NIH Molecular Libraries Screening Center Network, with a grant of $9 million, including a library of 100,000 molecular compounds, almost doubling the number already available at Emory.
One protein now under study at Emory enables cell-to-cell communication that triggers cancer oncogenes. Another interacts with the BRCA1 protein involved in breast cancer. Finding compounds to inhibit these proteins could prevent or slow the growth of tumors.
Recent work by the Emory team pointed to what would be needed in a drug to reactivate production of the protein that is missing in fragile X. Warren and his colleagues then identified compounds that work in fruit flies and mice. In an effort to fast-track drugs that can help human patients, they now are screening every drug ever approved by the FDA, more than 2000, looking for one or more with the same capabilities of these other compounds. They have identified several already and are confident that, with the safety and efficacy studies already completed for these drugs, clinical trials for fragile X patients can proceed rapidly.
Under a grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, other team members are using a novel technology developed at Emory to determine the true incidence of fragile X by screening samples from approximately 70,000 newborns in Georgia, using the dried blood samples left over from Georgia's Newborn Screening Program, which currently screens for more than 50 inherited metabolic disorders. The team hopes that fragile X can become part of routine newborn screening, allowing early intervention and support and eventually, use of new therapies under development.
and treatment
INDELs result from the insertion and deletion of small pieces of DNA of varying sizes and types. If SNPs (single chemical bases in the genome sequence) are analogous to single letter changes in the genome "instruction book," then INDELs are equivalent to insertion and deletion of whole words or paragraphs. Both SNPs and INDELs are likely to have a major impact on health and susceptibility to disease. At present, biochemist Scott Devine and his colleagues expect to expand their map of 400,000 INDELs to between 1 and 2 million in the near future.
The medical school also focuses on health disparities in other diseases. The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute recently awarded $6 million to Emory's medical and nursing schools, working in conjunction with Morehouse School of Medicine, to address health disparities in people at risk for developing cardiovascular disease.
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