A Medical Device Daily

The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), a unit of the National Institutes of Health, reported that it will award $6.8 million for the first year of funding to three new research centers, called DISCOVER (Disease Investigation Through Specialized Clinically-Oriented Ventures in Environmental Research).

NIEHS said that the primary goal of the new DISCOVER Centers will be to bridge the gap between basic research and clinical treatment of diseases caused by environmental factors.

The three new centers are:

• Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (Baltimore). Patrick Breysse, PhD, and collaborators will form a new DISCOVER Center called the Center for Childhood Asthma in the Urban Environment and examine how indoor and outdoor exposures to particulate matter and allergens may impact the airways of asthmatic children.

• Columbia University School of Public Health (New York). Frederica Perera, and her collaborators will focus on when and how common air pollutants from traffic and other combustion sources can affect the lungs of children.

• University of Washington (Seattle). Joel Kaufman, MD, and colleagues will focus their research efforts on understanding the impact of traffic-related air pollution on cardiovascular disease. Specifically, the program will seek to increase understanding of biological pathways related to inflammation and vascular dysfunction from air pollutants and progression of cardiovascular disease.

Dennis Lang, PhD, interim director of the NIEHS Division of Extramural Research and Training at NIEHS, said that the DISCOVER centers “will help to define the role of environmental agents in the initiation and progression of human disease and develop new ways to both prevent and treat disease.”

The NIEHS launched the DISCOVER program in January 2006 when the initial grant opportunities were announced. The centers reflect an integrated research approach to advance understanding of how the environment interacts with biological processes to either preserve health or cause disease by bringing together laboratory research and population-based studies.

“[E]ach DISCOVER center will support projects that will be patient-or clinically oriented, while also looking at the mechanisms of how certain environmental factors influence disease etiology, pathogenesis, susceptibility, progression, and prognosis,” said David Balshaw, PhD, an NIEHS scientist who helped develop the program.

Balshaw said that the new centers reflect the commitment of NIEHS to children’s health research. “Two of the DISCOVER centers are direct extensions of previously funded Centers for Children’s Environmental Health. The centers will focus their efforts on understanding the clinical impact of environmental exposures in children and extending that research to improve diagnosis and clinical intervention. We believe this work will also inform public policy and community education aimed at reducing the burden of children’s asthma.”

In other grant news:

Hayley McDaid, PhD, assistant professor of medicine and of molecular pharmacology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University, has been awarded a $100,000 grant from Joan’s Legacy: The Joan Scarangello Foundation to Conquer Lung Cancer to conduct research into the causes of lung cancer.

The grant, funded equally over two years by Joan’s Legacy and the LUNGevity Foundation, will support McDaid’s efforts to better understand mechanisms of specific lung cancer genotypes that contribute to the onset of lung cancer and how they can be targeted for therapy.
McDaid’s grant is part of $1.2 million in total funding that Joan’s Legacy is presenting to researchers at institutions during 2007, including grants made in collaboration with other research-focused lung cancer nonprofits, such as the LUNGevity Foundation.

The purpose of the grants is to support innovative research projects focused on lung cancer, which, with 160,000 deaths per year, the NO. 1 cancer killer in the U.S.
In studying the lung cancer genotypes, McDaid will focus on mutations in two proteins -B- RAF and K-RAS - to determine their response to targeted therapy. She has been a member of the Einstein faculty since 2001 and a member of the Albert Einstein Cancer Center since 2005, where she and her colleagues hold a patent for treating newly formed tumors using combination chemotherapy.
Joan’s Legacy is named for Joan Scarangello, a writer and non-smoker who died at age 47 after a nine-month fight with lung cancer. The organization is searching for a cure and focusing greater attention on the world’s leading cancer killer, including those who have never smoked.

In just five years, Joan’s Legacy has funded over $3.6 million in new lung cancer research.

“In 2007, we received a record-breaking 65 proposals for funding,” said Mary Ann Tighe, president of Joan’s Legacy. “This overwhelming response demonstrates how funding availability can stimulate the scientific community to focus efforts on this often neglected disease with its resultingly low survival rates.”