Friday, March 06, 2009
Grants get Carilion/Tech research going
The five awards of $30,000 are intended to act as seed money for collaborative research.
The latest from The Ticker blog
Collaborative research between Virginia Tech and Carilion Clinic is under way in ovarian cancer, obesity, infectious disease, pregnancy and health care quality.
In the first signs of research activity, the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute awarded five $30,000 grants to support the collaborative medical research between scientists at Virginia Tech and physicians at Carilion Clinic.
The funding disbursements come about six months after the clinic and the university started trying to match scientists with physicians through a series of lectures that sought to provide a venue for exchanging ideas.
The one-year grants are seed money to get the projects off the ground in hopes of securing larger research grants from major funding institutions like the federal government.
"This is just the carrot to get it going," said Dennis Dean, interim director of the research institute.
The grant awards will likely occur annually, Dean said, as the research institute tries to cultivate new health-related research projects that can help support the educational efforts of the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine.
Funding for the grants comes from the $70 million startup operating fund that will be used to launch and sustain the research institute in its early development. These specific projects are being supported from a portion of initial funds that have been contributed by Carilion to the fund. Virginia Tech is also contributing.
The school and the research institute will share a building on South Jefferson Street in Roanoke. Construction of that $59 million building is under way, and it is scheduled to open in August 2010, in time for the school to admit its first class of students. The school is going through an accreditation process and had a site visit in February to determine if it is meeting the criteria for accreditation.
Both the research institute and the school are in the process of hiring faculty and staff, with the research institute launching a nationwide search for its founding director. The goal is to have someone in place by Jan. 1, 2010.
Much of the research supported by the grants piggybacks on existing research, Dean said. But unlike the previous work, the new research seeks to include the clinical component offered by Carilion physicians.
"This is a very collaborative agreement," said Thomas Inzana, a clinical microbiologist and one of the researchers to get a grant. "These days it is very typical. Science is getting so specialized that in order to get funded you need collaborators in various areas."
Inzana is the Tyler J. and Frances F. Young Chair of Bacteriology at the Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine. He teamed up with a Virginia Tech physics professor and a Carilion infectious disease physician to develop a new diagnostic test for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, that would be faster than the current tests used.
Using samples from Carilion patients, the team will collect preliminary data on the new diagnostic test. It won't be used for final diagnosis but will tell the researchers how the test is working.
That data will later be used in applying for grants from the National Science Foundation or the National Institutes of Health, Inzana said.
For the researchers, the recently awarded grants are a sign of quick action to pair basic science in a laboratory with medical care.
"This is a step in the right direction," said Dr. Dennis Scribner, the gynecological oncology section chief at Carilion Clinic.
Scribner is part of one of the five research teams to be awarded the grant. Scribner is working with Chris Roberts, an associate professor of biomedical sciences and pathobiology in the College of Veterinary Medicine, and Eva Schmelz, an associate professor of human nutrition, food and exercise at Virginia Tech.
The trio has set out to compare the immune system changes that develop throughout the different stages of ovarian cancer in women. A similar comparison has already been done in mice.
Ultimately the results will allow the researchers to predict how different treatments and medications will work by conducting the tests on mice and using the data to predict how humans will respond. Then the research can move to human clinical trials.
The other three grants went to fund research looking at the physiological impacts of water-only fasting in hypertensive obese adults, applying industrial technology to improve health care quality in the emergency room, and screening and support for risks related to pregnancy in overweight women.
On the Net: www.vtc.vt.edu
