| CUMC Celebrates - May 2, 2007 |
CUMC faculty continue to garner major funding in record amounts from peer-reviewed federal and state sources, as well as from leading national foundations and associations. The successes highlighted in this issue, which lists selected large grants whose project periods began between January 1 and April 1, 2007, speak to the exceptional calibre of our work across the basic, pre-clinical, and clinical sciences, including collaboration across the many disciplines here at CUMC. Please join me in congratulating faculty among our schools.
Lee Goldman
EVP & Dean
GRANTS
College of Physicians & Surgeons
Mailman School of Public Health
School of Nursing
Mitchell C. Benson, MD, George F. Cahill Professor and chair of the department of urology, recently received an annual award of $350,000 from the T.J. Martell Foundation for Leukemia, Cancer, and AIDS Research to fund a variety of prostate cancer studies.
Fred Chang, MD, PhD, professor of genetics & development in microbiology, is the recipient of a $1.7 million extension of funding from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences for his ongoing investigations into cellular activity. He will further study how certain proteins work on the cell surface to assemble dynamic filament structures responsible for cell polarization and cell division. This work may have implications for understanding human cell biology and diseases such as cancer.
Jeanine D'Armiento, MD, assistant professor of medicine, has been awarded a $1.5 million grant by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute to study smoke-induced injury in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).The four-year grant will enable Dr. D'Armiento to explore potential correlations between cigarette smoke exposure and a protein expressed in the epithelial cells of the lungs of emphysema sufferers. Funds will also be used to identify genetic factors that increase the susceptibility to developing this disease upon smoke exposure.
Alex Dranovsky, MD, PhD, assistant professor of clinical psychiatry in neurobiology & behavior, has received a five-year, $885,000 career development award from the National Institute of Mental Health to study the contributions of neurons born in adulthood in the hippocampus, one region of the brain most responsible for translating emotional and cognitive information into memory. Dr. Dranovsky will specifically explore how adult-born neurons factor into the functioning and cellular composition of certain hippocampal structures, and will assess the impact of stress and antidepressant usage on neuronal turnover and circuit formation in this area of the brain.
Vincent P. Ferrera, PhD, associate professor of neuroscience in psychiatry, and Joy Hirsch, PhD, professor of functional neuroradiology in radiology (both also in the Center for Neurobiology and Behavior), have been awarded a two-year, $443,000 exploratory/ developmental grant by the National Institute of Mental Health to examine the roles and activities of neural networks in the brain during decision-making. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), they will map brain regions activated in human and non-human primates during decision-making tasks and relate this to patterns of brain involvement in this type of higher order cognition. The goal is to seek new avenues for research into the cognitive deficiencies of such diseases and conditions as schizophrenia, attention-deficit disorder, Parkinson's disease, and Alzheimer's disease.
Marianne Garland, MB, ChB, associate professor of clinical pediatrics, has received a two-year, $443,000 exploratory/developmental grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to study fetal exposure to the SSRI class of antidepressants. Dr. Garland will look specifically at fetal absorption and concentrations of two antidepressants with different metabolic profiles, fluoxetine (Prozac) and sertraline (Zoloft). The end goal is to allow the mother to continue effective drug therapy during pregnancy if necessary, while minimizing risks to offspring.
Michael Gershon, MD, professor of anatomy & cell biology, has received a four-year, $1.4 million extension of funding from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke for investigations into enteric (intestinal) neuron development. His work identifies the complex array of molecules governing the development of the enteric nervous system, linked to irritable bowel syndrome and other disorders of gastrointestinal motility and secretion.
Henry Ginsberg, MD, Herbert and Florence Irving Professor of Medicine and director of the Irving Center for Clinical Research, is the recipient of a five-year, $2 million grant from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute to probe the molecular mechanisms behind the regulation of fat levels in the blood. He will examine the integrated roles that fatty acids, insulin, and liver response to stress play in the assembly and secretion of liver fats with apolipoprotein B, the protein necessary to secrete fat from the liver. Loss of normal regulation of this system leads to the development of fatty liver and excessive blood levels of fat in individuals with metabolic syndrome and type-2 diabetes.
Joseph Gogos, MD, PhD, assistant professor of physiology & cellular biophysics (in the Center for Neurobiology and Behavior), has been awarded a $1 million grant over three years by the National Institute of Mental Health to clarify and deconstruct the gene networks that underlie genetic susceptibility to schizophrenia. He will map the structure of these networks, compare gene expression patterns in several different mouse models, and identify key signaling pathways involved in genetic risk for the disease.
Christian Habeck, PhD, assistant professor in the Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer’s Disease and the Aging Brain, is the recipient of a three-year, $867,000 research project grant from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering to study multivariate mathematical approaches to neuroimaging analysis both in general and in Alzheimer’s disease. Brain-imaging data of Alzheimer’s patients and healthy controls using multivariate techniques, which help identify networks of neurological activity across brain regions, will be compared and contrasted with univariate approaches, which do not provide information about region-by-region correlation in the brain. The funds will also be used to design a user-friendly multivariate analysis software package geared towards neuroscientists.
Scott Hammer, MD, Harold Neu Professor of Infectious Diseases, chief of the infectious diseases division (P&S), and professor of epidemiology (Mailman) has been awarded a $24.6 million grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to establish the Columbia Collaborative HIV/AIDS Clinical Trials Unit. This seven-year project will bring together investigators from CUMC, the NY Blood Center, and the Harlem Family Center of Harlem Hospital to form an integrated unit undertaking therapeutic and preventive vaccine clinical trials in NYC. They will work with an affiliated network that includes the AIDS Clinical Trial Group, the HIV Vaccine Trials Network, and the International Maternal Pediatric Adolescent AIDS Clinical Trials group. Development of junior investigators as clinical researchers and a comprehensive community education program are part of this major initiative.
Antonio Iavarone, MD, associate professor of neurology and pathology (in the Institute for Cancer Genetics), and Anna Lasorella, MD, assistant professor of pediatrics and pathology & cell biology (in the Institute for Cancer Genetics), have received $2 million from the Italian Ministry of Welfare’s Fellowship Program for Brain Tumor Research. The six-year project will study how proteins serving important functions in stem cells during development may contribute to brain tumors. The goal is to identify new ways to treat malignant brain tumors in children and adults.
Arthur Karlin, PhD, Higgins Professor of Biochemistry & Molecular Biophysics and Neurology and professor of physiology & cellular biophysics, has received $1.4 million from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke to study the molecular mechanisms of large-conductance, calcium-activated potassium channels (BK channels) in the cell. He and his colleague Steven Marx, MD, assistant professor of medicine-pharmacology and the Center for Molecular Cardiology, will look at how subunits of these calcium-activated potassium channels work together and the functional consequences of their physical interactions. The BK channels play major roles in smooth muscle and nerves, and their malfunction is implicated in stroke, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease.
Steven Kawut, MD, MS, Herbert Irving Assistant Professor of Clinical Medicine, has received a $2.1 million four-year research project grant from the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute to study the effects of subclinical pulmonary vascular dysfunction on the right ventricle of the heart. Pulmonary vascular disease and right ventricular failure increasingly affect older and minority Americans, who are the study’s focus.
Richard Kessin, PhD, professor of anatomy & cell biology, has received a two-year, $403,000 extension of funding from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences for the further development of a repository and library for strains of the amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum, an important model organism in increasing demand by the biomedical research community. Funds will be used to continue the recovery, annotation, and storage of Dictyostelium strains and to expand collaborations with the developers of dictyBase, the central informational website for Dictyostelium.
Andreas Kottmann, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry, has been awarded a $387,000 exploratory/developmental grant by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke to examine, via mouse model, whether removal of the protein Sonic hedgehog from dopamine-using neurons leads to functional or structural corruption of the adult brain’s dopamine system. The goal is to create a novel neurodegenerative disease model with implications for many neurological and psychiatric disorders.
Stavroula Kousteni, PhD, assistant professor of clinical medicine-endocrinology, is the recipient of $531,000 in research project funding from the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases. This award will allow Dr. Kousteni to further probe the molecular mechanisms by which certain synthetic hormones can prevent or reverse bone loss like conventional hormone replacement therapy (HRT), without damaging vital reproductive organs (a possible side effect of HRT).
John Krakauer, MD, assistant professor of neurology, has received a five-year, $1.6 million grant from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke to study functional anatomy of motor learning and memory. The project will use novel fMRI techniques Dr. Krakauer developed to examine how people associate learned patterns of muscle activation with new spatial goals and acquire new patterns of muscle movement that increase accuracy without reduction in speed. Expected are insights into mechanisms of recovery after focal brain injury. Dr. Krakauer also received a two-year, $387,000 exploratory/developmental grant from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke to characterize stroke-related loss of function in a portion of the brain at some distance from the site of injury, and to determine its contribution to mild stroke-induced paralysis through a novel imaging technique known as arterial spin labeling MRI.
Donald Landry, MD, PhD, professor of medicine-nephrology and interim chair of the department of medicine, recently received a three-year, $500,000 award from the Department of Defense's Defense Threat Reduction Agency to develop and test artificial enzymes to intercept and destroy nerve agents in the bloodstream before they reach their targets in the central nervous system.
Mathew Maurer, MD, Herbert Irving Assistant Professor of Clinical Medicine, was awarded a $2.1 million grant from the National Institute on Aging for work exploring how age-related changes in cardiovascular structure and function contribute to cardiovascular disorders in the elderly. This grant will be used to examine how normal mechanical, physical, and biochemical cardiac functions are disrupted in elderly patients with heart failure and normal ejection fraction (the amount of blood pumped from a ventricle with each heartbeat).
Richard Mayeux, MD, MSc, Gertrude H. Sergievsky Professor of Neurology (P&S), Psychiatry (P&S) and Epidemiology (Mailman) and co-director of the Taub Institute, and colleagues have received a $3 million grant from the Merrill Lynch Foundation to support research into the genetic influences involved in Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative diseases of aging. This award will support further investigation of SORL1, a major new gene implicated in late-onset Alzheimer’s, as well as functional genomics to study how alterations in processing of amyloid protein result in brain damage.
Virginia Papaioannou, PhD, professor of genetics & development, has received a multi-year, $2 million MERIT (“Method to Extend Research in Time”) award from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to further her ongoing investigations into the roles, functions, interactions, and molecular mechanisms of T-box genes in both normal and abnormal embryonic heart development, as well as in mammary gland and vascular system formation. T-box genes are critically involved in cellular decisions and cell differentiation in multiple organs during mammalian gestation. Dr. Papaioannaou’s studies could provide major insights into congenital heart defects known to be a leading cause of death in newborn infants.
The National Cancer Institute (NCI) has awarded Charles Powell, MD, Florence Irving Assistant Professor of Clinical Medicine, a five-year $1.8 million grant to study the tumor biology of lung cancer and examine why some lung cancers are more invasive than others. His earlier studies found that less of a certain receptor subtype (beta receptor II) of Transforming Growth Factor (TGF) was expressed in more invasive cancer. Dr. Powell and his associates will use mice genetically programmed not to express beta receptor II to create a novel animal model of the disease. Resulting information may help design diagnostic tests to predict how invasive a given lung cancer will be, as well as drugs to reduce or prevent the development of invasive tumors.
Burkhard Rost, PhD, associate professor of biochemistry & molecular biophysics, has been awarded a four-year, $1.3 million extension of funding by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) to upgrade and refine PredictProtein, an Internet server for the prediction of protein structure and function that has been running at Columbia since 1999. Dr. Rost and his team will seek and apply technical and scientific solutions—such as improvements in data handling, user interface, web page layout, and results presentation—to problems with PredictProtein’s current levels of functionality. The goal is to improve quality and accuracy of predictions and increase server accessibility among molecular biologists and other scientists.
Rodney Rothstein, PhD, professor of genetics & development, has received a $1.2 million extension of funding from the National Institute of General Medical Science for work on the genetics and cell biology of recombination, the process by which DNA breaks are repaired from homologous sequences. The work will investigate recombination and how repair proteins respond to DNA damage in living cells. These processes, examined in living yeast cells, are found in a wide range of organisms—including humans—and are associated with cancer and other diseases.
Mishaela Rubin, MD, assistant professor of clinical medicine-endocrinology, has received a two-year, $161,000 grant from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases to study the relationship between parathyroid hormone (PTH) and skeletal structure and function. This work extends her investigations of PTH to improve bone quality and bone turnover and should have implications for PTH-treated osteoporosis and parathyroid disease.
Henry Spotnitz, MD, George H. Humphreys II Professor of Surgery, received a five-year, $3.3 million grant from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute to further studies on biventricular pacing after cardiopulmonary bypass. His earlier research has documented substantial improvements in cardiac output among heart surgery patients undergoing biventricular pacing (also known as cardiac resynchronization therapy), which involves installation of pacemakers to fix delays in heart ventricle contractions and keeps the left/right ventricles pumping together.
Arielle D. Stanford, MD, assistant professor of clinical psychiatry in neuroscience, has been awarded $885,000 over five years by the National Institute of Mental Health for career development in the area of schizophrenia and non-invasive brain stimulation. She will examine the neurocircuitry of negative symptoms in schizophrenia by using repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) as both a neurobiological probe and therapeutic technique. The end goal is to develop novel treatment strategies tailored to the specific needs of the patient, based on the individual’s symptoms and disease profile.
Richard Vallee, PhD, professor of pathology, anatomy, & cell biology, has received a four-year, $2.5 million renewal of funding from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences to extend his studies of the "motor protein," cytoplasmic dynein, which participates in nerve growth and transport and cell division, and has been implicated in neurodegenerative disease. Dr. Valle was also recently awarded a five-year $1.7 million renewal from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to further investigations into the mechanisms that cause Type I lissencephaly (“smooth brain”), a rare but devastating developmental disorder characterized by lack of brain convolutions or folds, malformations that lead to severe mental retardation and poor movement control.
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The National Institute of Mental Health has awarded Karolynn Siegel, PhD, professor of sociomedical sciences, and her colleagues Helen-Maria Lekas, PhD, assistant professor of clinical sociomedical sciences, and Eric Schrimshaw, MA, a $2.1 million, 3-year grant to study men who have sex with both men and women and have disclosed their same sex behavior to their female partners. The project explores the sexual motivations, concealment behaviors, sexual practices and risk-reduction strategies of this at-risk group, as well as whether these men act as a bridge to HIV infection between their same- and opposite-sex partners.
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