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Newsletter from the Office of the Vice President for Research and Graduate Education - U. T. Dallas

University News

NIAID Awards $47 Million in New Effort to Develop Medical Countermeasures Against Radiological and Nuclear Threats

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) has issued more than $47 million for grants, contracts and interagency agreements as part of a new National Institutes of Health (NIH) research program on Medical Countermeasures Against Radiological and Nuclear Threats. This program emphasizes product development and seeks to develop preventions and treatments for radiation sickness following a terrorist attack.

NIAID is the lead institute at NIH for the development of biodefense countermeasures. Its research portfolio includes many in-depth studies of the immune system, which is especially vulnerable to radiation. For these reasons, the Department of Health and Human Services asked NIAID to coordinate and lead the development of a robust NIH research program on medical countermeasures to radiation. 

Funding for this program is from the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Public Health Emergency Preparedness. Twelve grants, four contracts and two interagency agreements have recently been formalized through this new NIH research program. While each award has a specific focus connected to product development or basic research, the sum of the efforts covers the necessary components to develop medical countermeasures from concept through licensure.

Eight universities or research institutes have received grants to establish Centers for Medical Countermeasures Against Radiation. These centers will focus on basic and applied research to develop new products for measuring radiation exposure, to protect against exposure and to minimize and treat the effects of exposure to a wide range of radioactive compounds.

Each center will be led by a principal investigator and may include a consortium of other research institutions. Funding for the centers totals about US$28.7 million for fiscal year 2005. NIAID plans to fund the centers for five years. The principal investigators and approximate funding for fiscal year 2005 for each center are as follows:

NIAID awarded a smaller set of grants to four other research organizations to support projects focused on protecting the immune system from radiation or restoring the immune system following radiation exposure. Products that provide pre-exposure protection could be used by first responders to prevent bone marrow damage, while post-exposure products would help restore immune system cells that are formed within bone marrow. These 18-month accelerated product development awards total $4.0 million:

Two universities and two companies have received contracts for developing medical countermeasures products. The largest of these contracts, Medical Countermeasures Against Radiological Threats: Product Development Support Services, was awarded to the University of Maryland School of Medicine. The university will receive about $9.3 million in fiscal year 2005. NIAID plans to fund this contract for five years to evaluate promising compounds to prevent, reduce or treat symptoms of radiation exposure. For example, under the contract, the university may develop products to protect first responders, speed healing of bone marrow, measure radiation exposure and decontaminate the body following exposure. Because different types of radiation and differing levels of exposure can damage the body in a variety of ways, an assortment of medical products are needed, explains Bert Maidment, Ph.D., NIAID associate director for product development for radiological and nuclear countermeasures.

The University of Kentucky, Lexington, Nanotherapeutics of Alachua, FL, and SRI International of Menlo Park, CA, also have received contracts for Development of Improved DTPA for Radionuclide Chelation. DTPA (short for the chemical diethylenetriaminepentaacetate) can be used to remove certain radioactive compounds from the body. If a person is exposed to one of these compounds, DTPA can be given intravenously to help eliminate the contamination. For use following a terrorist attack, however, DTPA would be practical only in an easier-to-administer form. The contractors will seek to develop alternate ways to effectively administer DTPA, either by inhalation, oral liquid or pill.

NIAID has awarded 14-month contracts with renewal options to

NIAID also has signed interagency agreements with two other federal government research institutes, the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute (AFRRI) and the National Cancer Institute (NCI), both of Bethesda, Maryland. Under these agreements, AFRRI received $1.3 million in 2005 to screen and evaluate compounds that could be used to prevent, mitigate or treat the effects of radiation exposure. AFRRI also will develop an automated approach to the assay of blood cell chromosome damage used to measure a person’s radiation exposure.

NCI, also part of the National Institutes of Health, received $1 million through a 2005 interagency agreement to develop compounds to protect against radiation exposure; conduct epidemiological studies on the medical consequences of radiation exposure; and identify compounds the body produces when exposed to radiation.

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National Cancer Institute Announces US$35 Million in Awards to 12 Cancer Nanotechnology Platform Partnerships

The National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), announced funding for a major component of its $144.3 million, five-year initiative for nanotechnology in cancer research. Awards totaling $35 million over five years, with $7 million total in the first year, will establish 12 Cancer Nanotechnology Platform Partnerships.

Nanotechnology, the development and engineering of devices so small that they are measured on a molecular scale, already has demonstrated promising results in cancer research and treatment. In September 2004, the NCI launched the NCI Alliance for Nanotechnology in Cancer as a comprehensive, integrated initiative to develop and translate cancer-related nanotechnology research into clinical practice.

The NCI Alliance for Nanotechnology in Cancer encompasses four major program components, including the Cancer Nanotechnology Platform Partnerships. These partnerships, modeled after the NIH Bioengineering Research Partnerships, are designed to develop technologies for new products in six key programmatic areas: molecular imaging and early detection, in vivo imaging, reporters of efficacy (e.g., real-time assessments of treatment), multifunctional therapeutics, prevention and control, and research enablers (opening new pathways for research).

The awards reflect a cross-section of technologies, disciplines, cancer types, geographies, and risk/reward profiles, and will link universities to NCI-Designated Cancer Centers. The awards, in alphabetical order by principal investigator, include:

The other three components of the NCI Alliance for Nanotechnology in Cancer, all of which are now funded and operational, include:

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NIH Funds Nine Science Education Partnership Awards

Whether they are learning why cardiovascular disease is more likely to strike African Americans, discovering how Lyme disease is transmitted, or studying aquatic organisms, students across the country are being encouraged to immerse themselves in science, as part of a National Institutes of Health (NIH) program to increase science literacy and encourage research careers.

Representatives of the NIH announced it will award US$9.4 million to fund nine Science Education Partnership Awards (SEPA). Administered by the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR), a component of the NIH, SEPA grants provide from two to five years of support.

The programs being awarded are:

SEPA programs serve K-12 students and teachers, as well as science centers and museums across the country. Many of the programs target underserved and/or minority populations that are less likely to pursue science careers. In addition, SEPA partnerships develop projects that educate the general public about health and disease, with the aim of helping people make better lifestyle choices as new medical advances emerge.

In the initial three-year phase, SEPA programs form partnerships among biomedical and clinical researchers, educators, community groups, and other interested organizations to create programs that provide a better understanding of scientific research. In the second two-year phase of the program, these SEPA-generated curricula are more broadly disseminated.

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NSF Renews Support for Penn's Laboratory for Research On the Structure of Matter with $21.6 Million Grant

The National Science Foundation has awarded a six-year, US$21.6 million grant to the Laboratory for Research on the Structure of Matter (LRSM) at the University of Pennsylvania.  The NSF funds, to be matched by approximately $2.1 million in support from the University, will allow one of the nation pioneering materials-research centers to continue its work developing innovative materials.   

The Penn center supports interdisciplinary research of scientists from three schools of the University.  Their work encompasses all manner of new materials, from nanotechnology to the so-called "soft matter" inspired by biology.

The LRSM was established in 1960 as one of the first materials research laboratories to be funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense.  In the 1970s funding was taken over by the National Science Foundation.

LRSM $21.6 million share ranks first among 13 centers nationwide receiving $152 million NSF support as part of its Materials Research Science and Engineering Center program.

The LRSM's research program, which involves faculty from Penn's School of Arts and Sciences, School of Engineering and Applied Science and School of Medicine, targets new advanced materials with potential for applications in diverse areas such as energy transduction, electronics, sensors and medicine.    

As part of its mission, the LRSM devotes about 10 percent of its grant to sustaining its efforts in education and community outreach.  Over the years, the laboratory has built a very successful partnership with regional schoolteachers and their students to instill an interest in scientific discovery.

The outreach extends to higher education as well, through programs that embrace undergraduate research experience and allow faculty from developing nations, such as Lesotho, to further their scientific expertise at LRSM. The LRSM also has a long-standing relationship with the University of Puerto Rico at Humacao.  Each summer students and faculty from Puerto Rico come to Penn's campus to take part in research at LRSM.

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NSF Awards $7.6 Million for ISR National Election Studies

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded US$7.6 million to fund the American National Election Studies (ANES), conducted by the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research (ISR) since 1952, through the year 2009.

The new grant includes some significant changes in the long-term, internationally emulated study, considered the gold standard in understanding political attitudes and electoral behavior. These include a partnership with Stanford University and a series of methodological innovations that will make the study more powerful and more democratic.

By asking the same questions for more than half a century, before and after each presidential election, the ANES allows analysts to identify trends in public opinion that are not apparent in snapshot surveys and polls.

Under the new grant, the ANES will also re-interview a panel of the same participants more than half a dozen times in order to explore the causes and consequences of voting behavior and electoral outcomes. This panel design will provide insight into how election-year politics, including campaign ads, affect citizen judgments of candidates and of a new administration in the formative months of its term.

In addition to helping Americans understand how democracy works, the study will itself become more diverse and democratic in organization and management, according to Arthur Lupia, a research professor at the ISR and principal investigator of the new grant with Stanford political scientist Jon Krosnick. Starting in January 2006, on online commons will be up and running, allowing faculty members and graduate students from around the nation to propose new questions for the study, and comment on the proposals of others.

The ANES will also incorporate evolving communication technologies that have changed survey interviewing over the last few years. In their face-to-face interviews with respondents, interviewers will use the latest computer-assisted personal interviewing techniques, presenting respondents with visual stimuli, including photographs of politicians and videos of campaign ads.

According to Krosnick and Lupia, this approach will allow the study team to use measurement tools that have been refined in laboratories but rarely administered to representative national samples of adults. One of these tools is reaction time measurement, designed to elucidate the non-conscious, automatic processes that inform much thinking and behavior.

Another innovative technique for measuring sensitive phenomena is audio computer-assisted self-interviewing. Respondents read a sensitive question on the laptop screen and hear the question asked through headphones, then enter their answers directly into the computer. The technique enhances accuracy in reporting sensitive issues and also overcomes literacy limitations.

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UGA College of Public Health Receives $1.94 Million Grant to Establish the First Geriatric Education Center in Georgia

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has awarded the College of Public Health at the University of Georgia a grant to fund the state’s first Geriatric Education Center. The five-year, US$1.94 million grant is being funded by the health and human services’ Health Services Research Administration.

The center is a collaboration between UGA’s Institute of Gerontology, Emory University’s Division of Geriatric Medicine, and Armstrong Atlantic State University’s School of Health Professional.  The primary goal of the center is to provide and upgrade training of all levels of professionals (clinicians, university faculty, nursing home administrators and assistants and care staff) who work directly with older adults in Georgia with special emphasis in medically underserved areas.

The GEC will be directed by Leonard Poon, professor of public health and psychology.  He will be assisted by Anne Glass, assistant professor of public health and assistant director of the Institute of Gerontology.  UGA faculty from a number of colleges and departments will be actively involved.  Some of these faculty members are Paul Brooks, pharmacy; Steve Miller, psychology; Stacey Kolomer, social work; Doug Bachtel, housing and consumer economics; and Stuart Feldman, public health.  The Georgia GEC will be working closely with the Stanford, Kentucky-Appalachia, and South Carolina GECs to launch collaborative training programs.

The creation of the center follows the Institute of Gerontology’s recent launch of a “Public Health and Older Georgians Initiative” to increase attention and focus on public health issues among the older population.

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Whitehead Research Opens Door to New Stem Cell Work

Scientists at MIT and the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research have successfully demonstrated that a theoretical -- and controversial -- technique for generating embryonic stem cells is indeed possible, at least in mice.

The theory, called altered nuclear transfer (ANT), proposes that researchers first create genetically altered embryos that are unable to implant in a uterus, and then extract stem cells from these embryos. Because the embryos cannot implant, they are by definition not "potential" human lives. Some suggest that this would quell the protests of critics who claim that embryonic stem cell research necessitates the destruction of human life. Scientists and ethicists have debated the merits of this approach although it had not been proved possible.

"The purpose of our study was to provide a scientific basis for the ethical debate," said MIT Biology Professor and Whitehead member Rudolf Jaenisch, lead author on the paper, which was published in the Oct. 16 online edition of Nature. "Our work is the first proof-of-principle study to show that altered nuclear transfer not only works but is extremely efficient."

First proposed by William Hurlbut, a Stanford University professor and member of the President's Council on Bioethics, ANT has been described as an ethical alternative to somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), also known as therapeutic cloning.

For SCNT, a donor nucleus, for example one taken from a skin cell, is implanted into a donor egg cell from which the nucleus had been removed. This egg cell is then tricked into thinking it has been fertilized. That causes it to grow into a blastocyst -- a mass of about 100 cells -- from which stem cells are removed. These embryonic stem cells can divide and replicate themselves indefinitely, and they can also form any type of tissue in the human body. However, to cull these stem cells, the blastocyst must be destroyed, which some critics insist is tantamount to destroying a human life.

The procedure theorized by Hurlbut is similar to SCNT, but with one crucial twist: Before the donor nucleus is transferred into the egg cell, its DNA is altered so that the resulting blastocyst has no chance of ever becoming a viable embryo. As a result, a "potential human being" is not destroyed once stem cells have been extracted.

Jaenisch -- a firm supporter of all forms of human embryonic stem cell research -- has shown that technical concerns about this approach can be overcome.

Jaenisch and Alexander Meissner, a graduate student in his lab, focused on a gene called Cdx2, which enables an embryo to grow a placenta. In order to create a blastocyst that cannot implant in a uterus, the researchers disabled Cdx2 in mouse cells.

They accomplished this with a technique called RNA interference, or RNAi. Here, short interfering RNA (siRNA) molecules are designed to target an individual gene and disrupt its ability to produce protein. In effect, the gene is shut off. Jaenisch and Meissner designed a particular form of siRNA that shut off this gene in the donor nucleus and then incorporated itself into all the cells comprising the blastocyst. As a result, all of the resulting mouse blastocysts were incapable of implantation.

However, once the stem cells had been extracted from the blastocysts, Cdx2 was still disabled in each of these new cells, something that needed to be repaired in order for these cells to be useful. To correct this, Meissner deleted the siRNA molecule by transferring a plasmid into each cell. (A plasmid is a unit of DNA that can replicate in a cell apart from the nucleus. Plasmids are usually found in bacteria, and they are a staple for recombinant DNA techniques.) The stem cells resulting from this procedure proved to be just as robust and versatile as stem cells procured in the more traditional fashion.

"The success of this procedure in no way precludes the need to pursue all forms of human embryonic stem cell research," Jaenisch said. "Human embryonic stem cells are extraordinarily complicated. If we are ever to realize their therapeutic potential, we must use all known tools and techniques in order to explore the mechanisms that give these cells such startling characteristics."

ANT, Jaenisch emphasized, is a modification, but not an alternative, to nuclear transfer, since the approach requires additional manipulations of the donor cells. He said he hopes that this modification may help resolve some of the issues surrounding work with embryonic stem cells and aid the effort to secure federal funding for such work.

This research was supported by the National Institutes of Health/National Cancer Institute.

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Terry Foundation Adds UTD To Its Prestigious Scholarship Program

The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) has become one of only a handful of universities in the state — and the only one in North Texas — to benefit from the prestigious Terry Foundation scholarship program.

The award, which covers tuition and fees, text books, on-campus housing and miscellaneous expenses, is typically a four-year offering, subject to satisfying grade and other requirements on an annual basis. The amount of the award also takes into account a student’s financial resources and other aid, such as Pell grants.

Criteria for selection include academic excellence, leadership and financial need. Eight freshmen will become UTD’s first Terry Scholars for the fall 2006 academic year.

The foundation is the largest source of private scholarships for the University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M University, the University of Houston and Texas State University–San Marcos.

Nominations for the scholarships will be fielded through UTD’s Office of Undergraduate Education, headed by Dr. Michael Coleman, associate provost and dean of undergraduate education.

The Terry Foundation was established in 1986 by Houstonians Howard and Nancy Terry out of a desire to help young people help themselves. The foundation’s goal is to strengthen the state by identifying Texas high school graduates who demonstrate the promise of future leadership distinction and by assisting them in developing their abilities and the abilities of those around them.

The Foundation Board manages an endowment of approximately $125 million, provided entirely by the founders. Earnings from the endowment fund the program, which is designed to exist in perpetuity.

The foundation will award scholarships to selected UTD students on an annual basis. For more information about the program, please visit www.terryfoundation.org.

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UT Regents Receive Additional Settlement in Patent Suit

The Board of Regents of The University of Texas System has reached a settlement in a patent infringement lawsuit against Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V. and Philips Electronics North America Corp. The terms of this settlement are confidential and will not be made public. 

The UT System Board of Regents holds the intellectual property rights to the technology (Patent No. 4,674,112). Litigation was filed in March in U.S. District Court, Western District of Texas, to enforce the "character pattern recognition and communications apparatus" patent covering software co-invented by Dr. George Kondraske, professor of electrical and biomedical engineering at UT Arlington. Representing the UT System Board of Regents in the litigation is the Dallas-based law firm Shore Chan LLP.

Philips is one of the world’s largest electronics companies with 159,709 employees in over 60 countries and sales in 2004 of $36.2 billion. The predictive text input functionality in Philips’ mobile phones is enabled by “T9” software licensed from Tegic Communications Corp.

Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V. and Philips Electronics North America Corp. are two of over 40 entities named in three lawsuits filed by the UT System Board of Regents in relation to the patent. Several other defendants, including Research in Motion Limited, Research in Motion Corp., MiTAC International Corp., MiTAC Inc., MiTAC USA, Inc., Mio Technology Ltd., Mio Technology Corp., USA, and MiTAC Service Centre (Houston) have taken a license and settled under The Board of Regents' established licensing terms. Negotiations continue with the remaining entities named in the lawsuits.

Information concerning the lawsuits is available on-line at www.112patent.com.

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