Four Dartmouth researchers received a five-year $12 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to support the creation of a multidisciplinary Institutional Development Award Center, which will stimulate new molecular epidemiology research at the Geisel School of Medicine.
The grant funds, awarded earlier this month, will be used by Geisel epidemiology professor Brock Christensen, pediatrics professor Juliette Madan, community and family medicine professor Diane Gilbert-Diamond and College biology professor Tracy Punshon to support research targeting biomedical prevention and changes in medical practice, Geisel communications director Derik Hertel said.
Pharmacology and toxicology professor Carmen Marsit and pathology professor Wendy Wells will direct the Biorepository Core, which provides specialized expertise to proposed grant projects.
"[The grant] is going to make us a much more recognized program for molecular epidemiology and help us to recruit more students and faculty and build that program," Marsit said.
Christensen said the grant will have a "tremendous positive impact beyond research dollars" because it brings together people from different backgrounds and allows new professors to further develop their research.
The four researchers will work with Marsit and Wells to develop their projects during the grant's first phase.
"I serve as a mentor for some of the projects and provide support for junior investigators in terms of core resources and administrative correspondence," Marsit said. "This grant will help with gathering populations and looking at biological specimens for various molecular features, allowing us to do that in a very controlled way with high quality specimens."
The grant marks a move by Geisel to broaden its fields of research, Punshon said.
"It promotes multidisciplinary work and puts Geisel at the forefront of that because it's a really diverse team," Punshon said. "It's the first time they've put together a group this diverse."
Christensen is one of the primary investigators on a project that aims to extend understanding of how epigenetic variation may relate to breast cancer risk factors.
"We are taking a couple of different angles to approach it, initially collaborating with New Hampshire mammography to identify women who have been diagnosed with non-invasive breast cancer because there is an incomplete understanding of risk factors or potential risk of progressing to invasive disease," Christensen said. Punshon's research will focus on imaging metal distribution in the placenta, which is part of a larger cohort that looks at pregnant women, their children and diet and health outcome records.
"The biggest unknown is what gets transferred across the placenta, and there is a lot of knowledge needed on which transporters move these metals across the placenta," Punshon said. "My part of it is involved with elemental imaging of cadmium, mercury, arsenic and lead in placenta of women from the New Hampshire birth cohort."
The project will consider women's backgrounds and what their exposures were in order to measure bulk metal transport across the placenta. The project aims to link specific metals with affected genes to understand the processes that are involved in placental transportation.
Madan's project will determine infection and allergy risk factors in infants, while Gilbert-Diamond will investigate the connection between vitamin D and immune function in children. Both Madan and Gilbert-Diamond were unavailable for comment before press time.
The Institute of General Medical Sciences at NIH hands out the fund, specifically known as the Centers of Biomedical Research Excellence grant. It was begun 15 years ago when Congress observed that research grant money was concentrated in only 27 states, said Bill Green, Geisel microbiology and immunology department chair.
Congress created a special fund to allow the other 23 states to develop by improving their infrastructure.
The Centers of Biomedical Research Excellence grants involve three phases. During the first, junior faculty members who have not yet had their own NIH grants develop research programs. The second phase is more competitive, and allows the investigators to use funding to recruit more senior investigators. The final portion does not involve full projects but is geared towards building sustainable core facilities to ensure that all the projects are sustainable.
Geisel is currently working with three of the COBRE grants in the molecular epidemiology, immunology and lung biology departments, the latter two of which are in phase three, Green said.
Community and medicine professor Margaret Karagas, the principal investigator for the grant, did not respond to requests for comment before press time.
