Weill Cornell Researcher Joins Forces with Fellow Scientists To Manage Risks Associated with Common Pain Killers
Dr. Timothy Hla, director of the Center for Vascular Biology and professor of pathology and laboratory medicine, is a key member of an interdisciplinary and inter-institutional research team from the Personalized NSAID Therapeutics Consortium.
Established by an $18.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health's National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, the consortium is comprised of an international group of scientists who are collaborating to develop a way to manage the risks of serious side effects due to differing responses to nonsterodial anti-inflammatory drugs, or NSAIDS. These drugs are used to relieve pain and inflammation — ibuprofen, naproxen and celebrex, for example — and are among the most common medications consumed worldwide, but physicians still do not know the best NSAID of choice for patients with arthritis and heart disease or if NSAIDs differ in clinical efficacy and risk for different individuals.
The consortium aims to use the power of contemporary "omics" technologies — genomics, proteomics, metabolomics — to address individual response to NSAIDs. Using NSAIDs that differ in their preferences for blocking the COX-2 enzymes, the molecules responsible for inflammation and pain, the researchers will seek to identify the molecular signatures that discriminate drug action in cells and model systems. Collaborators will then integrate this information with clinical trial data to understand how NSAIDs perturb biological networks, looking for both benefit and risk.
Researchers will be integrating data from studies involving yeast, mammalian cells, zebrafish, mice and humans for this larger study. Dr. Hla will receive $709,800 over the course of five years to test in mouse models the role of COX-2 regulatory factors, such as the RNA binding protein HuR, in vascular function and the effects of pain killers (NSAIDs and COXibs).
Public Health Researchers Receive Grants on Drug Addiction, Infectious Disease, Postoperative Infection
Two public health researchers were awarded a total of $1.8 million to conduct four research projects on drug abuse, infectious disease and postoperative infection.
Dr. Bruce Schackman, chief of the Division of Health Policy and associate professor of public health
Dr. Bruce Schackman, chief of the Division of Health Policy and associate professor of public health, was awarded a three-year R01 grant for $1,474,844 from the National Institute on Drug Abuse titled "Quality of Life Outcomes in Prescription and Injection Opioid Dependence."
The purpose of the study is to measure quality of life in opioid dependence using primary data from a survey of the US population and secondary data from opioid dependent patients enrolled in three national studies. Results will provide quality of life estimates and guidance for cost-effectiveness and comparative effectiveness studies of opioid dependence treatment. The study will also evaluate novel methodologies for assessing these outcomes.
Co-investigators include Dr. Jeremy Bray from RTI International, Dr. Yih-Ing Hser from University of California Los Angeles, Dr. Bohdan Nosyk from the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS and Dr. Eve Wittenberg from the Harvard School of Public Health. Study staff includes Jared Leff, program supervisor in the Division of Health Policy, and Allison Dunning, research biostatistician in the Division of Biostatistics and Epidemiology, both at Weill Cornell.
Dr. Nathaniel Hupert, associate professor of public health and associate professor of medicine
Dr. Schackman also received a new sub-award for a five-year grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse titled "Intensive Models of HCV Care for Injection Drug Users." The dollar amount awarded for the first year of the subcontract is $75,234. In this study, patients from methadone clinics will be randomized to one of three models of hepatitis C care: directly observed therapy; concurrent group treatment; or standard on-site care. The principal investigator is Dr. Alain Litwin of Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Jared Leff is a staff member on the grant. Dr. Schackman and Leff will oversee cost data collection and analyze the costs of delivering care in the study, and Dr. Schackman will contribute to the cost-effectiveness analysis design and implementation.
Dr. Schackman is but one public health researcher to be awarded grants this summer. Dr. Nathaniel Hupert, associate professor of public health and associate professor of medicine, has also been awarded a renewed contract with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for preparedness modeling. In the one-year $194,840 grant, which ends next June, Dr. Hupert will lead a number of computational modeling activities at the CDC's National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases. These will include projects on detection and response to special pathogens such as Bacillus anthracis; resource modeling for public health and medical response to a variety of emergency scenarios; and improved "public health information engineering" for improved logistical capability after detection of disease outbreaks.
Additionally, Dr. Hupert has also been awarded a contract with Hospital for Special Surgery for $80,000 to create a computer model to explore strategies for reducing the rate of postoperative infection for spinal surgery. This project will employ quantitative and qualitative methods to better understand the potential causes of hospital-acquired infection for patients undergoing spinal surgery at Hospital for Special Surgery. The goal of the project is to identify promising targets for infection-reduction interventions in the process of care for patients undergoing spinal surgeries.
Additional Grants
Dr. Heather H. McCrea, a fourth-year neurosurgery resident, is among 10 researchers awarded $40,000 grants for 2012-2013 by the Neurosurgery Research and Education Foundation. Dr. McCrea's study is titled "The Role of Angiocrine Expression of Notch Ligands in Glioma Progression." She is sponsored by Dr. Shahin Rafii. The Foundation provides research funding opportunities as a means to make advances in the diagnosis and treatment of neurological conditions such as brain tumors, strokes and spinal disorders. Applications for the grant were reviewed by the Foundation's Scientific Advisory Committee. Once submissions were evaluated, the SAC provided funding recommendations to the Foundation's Executive Council.
Dr. Siobhan Pattwell, a postdoctoral fellow in the Sackler Institute for Developmental Pyschobioloy, and Dr. Deqiang Jing, assistant professor of neurobiology in psychiatry, were two of more than 200 researchers to receive National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression Young Investigator Grants from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation. Dr. Pattwell will receive $60,000 over the course of two years to identify windows of maximal opportunity for therapeutic interventions that are tailored to appropriate individuals at the most appropriate time. She hopes to do this by delineating age-specific variation in the regulation of fear responses that are at the very core of therapeutics for anxiety disorders. She will perform parallel mouse and human studies to investigate the developmental role of reconsolidation update on the erasure of conditioned cued and contextual memories. Similarly, Dr. Jing will also receive $60,000 over the course of two years to test the hypothesis that deficiency of a gene called Slitrk5 leads to OCD-like behaviors as a result of altered formation of the synapse, the site where brain-cell communication takes place. Dr. Jing will include detailed analyses of the role Slitrk5 in synapse formation in vitro and in further animal studies. The Brain and Behavior Research Foundation is dedicated to identifying the causes, improving treatments and developing prevention strategies for mental illnesses.