The Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation announced today that it has received a $10 million grant from the National Institutes of Health.
“This is yet another important step in the emergence of Oklahoma as a center of biomedical excellence,” said OMRF President Dr. J. Donald Capra. “Five years ago, this state had never seen a $10 million NIH grant. And now we have three.”
All three grants, including this most recent one, have been awarded under the NIH’s Centers of Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE) program, which helps build research infrastructure to enhance institutions’ research capacity and competitiveness for NIH grants. The previous COBRE grants were an $11.8 million award to OMRF in 2000 and an $11.4 million award to the Dean A. McGee Eye Institute last year. The $11.8 million OMRF award is believed to be the state’s largest NIH grant ever.
“Each year, the COBRE programs brings millions of federal dollars to Oklahoma that otherwise would go elsewhere” Capra said. “Representative Ernest Istook was instrumental in persuading Congress to start this program, which helps the states that receive the fewest biomedical research dollars.”
This most recent grant, which was submitted by OMRF’s Dr. Rodger McEver, will be used to mentor five junior researchers—four at OMRF and one at the University of Oklahoma. All five will work on projects involving glycosylation, the addition of sugar chains to molecules during or after synthesis.
The multidisciplinary grant will be awarded over a five-year period. “Oklahoma has developed major strengths in glycobiology, the study of sugars and their role in biology,” McEver said. “This grant will build on those strengths by combining them with our expertise in cardiovascular biology, bioengineering and immunology.”
Under the grant, a trio of senior scientists—OMRF’s McEver and Dr. Charles Esmon as well as the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center’s Dr. Richard Cummings—will serve as mentors to the junior researchers. The grant will also draw on the resources of four state-of-the-art core facilities located at the Oklahoma Health Center—a pair of microscopy facilities at OMRF, OMRF’s small animal magnetic resonance imaging facility and the glycoconjugate analysis facility at OUHSC.
The overall aim of the grant, said McEver, is two-fold. “First, we want to learn more about these sugar chains, as understanding them will help us to learn more about inflammation, blood coagulation and other important disease-related processes. But just as importantly, we want to help a group of promising researchers become fully funded, independent investigators.”
This latter goal, said Capra, is crucial to Oklahoma’s future. “If we want to compete with states on the East and West Coast for NIH dollars, we have to develop a critical mass of talented, well-funded scientists. This grant helps us to do just that.”
The scientists whose work will be funded by the grant are:
Mentors:
Dr. Rodger McEver (Principal Investigator) (OMRF)
Dr. Charles Esmon (OMRF)
Dr. Richard Cummings (OUHSC)
Junior Investigators:
Dr. Myron Hinsdale (OMRF)
Dr. Cristina Lupu (OMRF)
Dr. Patrick Wilson (OMRF)
Dr. Lijun Xia (OMRF)
Dr. David Schmidtke (OU)
Core Facility Directors:
Dr. Florea Lupu (OMRF)
Dr. Rheal Towner (OMRF)
Dr. Lijun Xia (OMRF)
Dr. Richard Cummings (OUHSC)
About OMRF:
OMRF (www.omrf.org) is a nonprofit biomedical research institute dedicated to understanding and curing human disease. Its scientists focus on such critical research areas as Alzheimer’s disease, cancer and cardiovascular disease. OMRF is home to Oklahoma’s only Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and only member of the National Academy of Sciences in the area of biomedical research.
