NSU Joins Biomedical Research

Oklahomas ability to find new treatments, and possibly cures, for many of the diseases that claim millions of lives worldwide each year has just expanded thanks to a federal grant of almost $6 million from the National Center for Research Resources of the National Institutes of Health.
Through their Institutional Development Award Program (IdeA), the NIH will provide Oklahoma with approximately $2 million a year for the next three years to establish a Biomedical Research Infrastructure Network (BRIN) program in the state, with the goal of increasing the number of NIH-funded scientists in biomedical research statewide. NSU joins seven other universities for the program.

The underlying goal of the grant is to expose students to the world of biomedical research, especially to students in underrepresented groups, such as African-Americans and Native Americans. Thats why Oklahomas BRIN includes NSU, which has the highest population of Native Americans in the country.
We are going to develop grant programs to provide research funds for the faculty at those institutions, said Dr. Frank Waxman, director of the Oklahoma Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research, which provide linkages to scientists at the graduate institutions and allow training opportunities for students during the summer, all in an effort to encourage them to enter the field of biomedical research.

A major initiative of the Oklahoma BRIN is to create an Oklahoma Microarry Network designed to link together biomedical research. By establishing this network, Oklahomas biomedical scientists will have access to advanced capabilities to engage in functional genomics, a new and revolutionary science that resulted from work on the Human Genome Project. Cataloging the many sequences of human DNA is a goal of the Human Genome Project, and the microarray network is the next stop in understanding many diseases.
The key to all of this is that once you have gene sequences, then you can put these gene sequences on microchips, or microarrays, and through applying different conditions, find out which genes are turned on and which are turned off, said Waxman. By doing that, you can target therapeutics for treating all kinds of diseases.

A third component of the grant is the purchase of a functional Magnetic Resonance Imager the first one in Oklahoma Devoted to research that doctors and scientists would use to map patterns of brain activity in animals. The instrument, which costs more than $1 million, will allow Oklahoma researchers to participate in the field of neuroscience and help them understand neurological diseases, like Alzheimers, even better.

Published: 2001-11-01 00:00:00