Through SUNY REACH Consortium, UB is Awarded NIH Grants in Neuroscience and Pediatric Pharmacology

BUFFALO, N.Y. – The University at Buffalo has been awarded funding to conduct important medical research in neuroscience and pediatric pharmacology as part of SUNY REACH, a collaborative research network of SUNY's four academic health centers and the College of Optometry.

"The University at Buffalo is proud to be partnering with other SUNY institutions in developing interventions against the leading cause of blindness in children and in developing the Clinical Trials Network in neurology," says Michael E. Cain, MD, UB vice president for health sciences and dean of the School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. "This success of the SUNY REACH initiative has proven the power of the SUNY system in biomedical research."

Along with its SUNY REACH partners, UB's researchers in the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences were awarded part of a highly competitive, U54 National Institutes of Health grant to establish the New York Pediatric Developmental Pharmacology Research Consortium. The NIH's U54 grants fund large research programs, focused on a specific problem or theme, involving a multidisciplinary attack on a specific disease entity or biomedical problem area.

UB will be a key player in this new consortium, the nation's only center focused on pediatric ocular pharmacology; the goal is to study and develop novel drug therapies to prevent blindness in preterm newborn babies.

The purpose of this five-year, $3.5 million grant to the SUNY REACH participants from the NIH's Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, is Retinopathy of Prematurity, (ROP) a condition that contributes to vision loss and in the most serious cases, blindness, in premature infants.

UB's investigators on this grant are William J. Jusko, PhD, SUNY Distinguished Professor and chair of UB's Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, and Donald E. Mager, PharmD, PhD, associate professor and Jun Qu, PhD, assistant professor, both in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences. They will be involved in the translational research aspects of the research, working to translate scientific advances into effective clinical treatments for patients. Jacob V.Aranda, MD, PhD, professor and director of neonatalogy at SUNY Downstate Medical Center, is principal investigator on the grant.

A key focus of the research is the hypothesis that caffeine and ibuprofen, used together, can be used to regulate the overgrowth of vessels that lead to retinopathy of prematurity in animal models.

Once studies on the safety, efficacy and timing of intervention have been completed, randomized clinical testing will begin at UB and at the other SUNY sites in the consortium.

"We are pleased to collaborate with the Downstate pediatric pharmacology group, combining Dr. Mager's expertise in pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics and Dr. Qu's capabilities in proteomics and bioanalysis to help develop future therapies for newborn infants," says Jusko.

A second grant, from the NIH National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, (NINDS) has been awarded through the SUNY REACH program to researchers in the Department of Neurology in UB's School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences.

The purpose of this $650,000 grant to the SUNY REACH participants is to create the infrastructure necessary to develop and implement research protocols in neurological disorders. This will be achieved using the SUNY REACH template for developing a statewide network of patients and research infrastructure to expand the SUNY Clinical Trials Network.

"The collaboration among SUNY units that this grant helps us achieve makes a huge difference in terms of how much research we can do on neurological diseases and how efficiently we can do it," says Robert N. Sawyer, Jr., MD, academic scholar, clinical associate professor and interim chair, UB Department of Neurology and co-principal investigator.

"As part of this group, we will deliver groups of patients for clinical trials that are much larger than if each individual institution tried to do it on its own," says Sawyer. "Higher numbers of patients will allow us to rapidly reach more accurate conclusions about the causes and best treatments for a variety of disease states."

The grant positions SUNY's academic health centers, including UB, to participate in the NIH NINDS network for Excellence in Neuroscience Clinical Trials (NeuroNEXT) projects, which aims to speed up early phase clinical trials on new therapies. Principal investigator on the project is Steven R. Levine, MD, professor of neurology and associate dean of clinical research at SUNY Downstate Medical Center.

SUNY REACH (Research Excellence in Academic Health) is comprised of UB, Downstate Medical Center, the College of Optometry, Stony Brook University School of Medicine and Upstate Medical University.

Member campuses of SUNY REACH each contributed approximately $180,000 to fund the consortium. Federal research dollars from the National Science Foundation and NIH at these campuses account for 60 percent of all federal research dollars awarded to SUNY.

SUNY REACH aims to make SUNY a competitive leader in biomedical research that significantly affects the health of New Yorkers. The consortium provides a unique research opportunity by involving campuses geographically spread across New York State; it capitalizes on their collective access to urban and rural populations that are racially, ethnically and culturally diverse. As these latest grants demonstrate, SUNY REACH also leverages the power of the individual SUNY academic health centers to obtain grant funding.

The University at Buffalo is a premier research-intensive public university, a flagship institution in the State University of New York system and its largest and most comprehensive campus. UB's more than 28,000 students pursue their academic interests through more than 300 undergraduate, graduate and professional degree programs. Founded in 1846, the University at Buffalo is a member of the Association of American Universities.