May 18, 2010

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded $1 billion for building and renovating biomedical research centers. Local universities and health organizations have won $28 million of that for centers dedicated to pulmonary disease, AIDS, and cancer.

The University of California Davis (UCD), San Francisco Department of Public Health, University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), and SRI International are among 15 California research centers receiving grants from the $1 billion in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act Funds that the NIH is distributing.

NIH has awarded 146 grants in 44 states, The District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. And the15 research centers in California receiving grants, amount to 10 percent of the total number dispersed nationally.

Of the local recipients UCD took the biggest slice, $14.2 million for construction of a new19,000-square-foot research facility at The California National Primate Research Center on the UCD campus. The center will be used for researching how environmental pollutants affect lung development and aggravate asthma and respiratory infections, especially in children.

The primate center houses an inhalation exposure facility, the only one in a primate center in the country. Researchers there helped define air quality standards for the Environmental Protection Agency.

 “We’re sort of a national resource,” said Dallas Hyde, Director of the center and a distinguished professor in the Department of Anatomy, Physiology and Cell Biology in the School of Veterinary Medicine at UCD.  But the facility is 32 years old and in need of new equipment.

And currently these researchers are scattered all over campus at the Vet School and the primate center, said Andy Fell, a UCD spokesman. The new building will not only allow more collaboration and allow scientists to generate more research, it will make it easier to attract new talent, Fell said.

The university is working on environmental impact review requirements currently and expects to start occupying the new center in the fall of 2013, Hyde said.

Another large NIH grant went to the San Francisco Office of AIDS Renovation (SOAR), located in the San Francisco Health Department.  SOAR received more than $9.5 million. That money will allow the three HIV/AIDS prevention research units to recruit large patient studies and to do community outreach.

Currently there are three units working on HIV/AIDS research within the San Francisco City buildings and space is too limited and broken up to foster good communication or the opportunity for accommodating large community meetings, said Susan Buchbinder, Director of the HIV Research Section in the San Francisco Department of Public Health.

This renovation grant will increase the space from 7,400 square feet to 16,500 square feet which will enhance collaboration between the three research units, currently Buchbinder’s unit is spread out on the first, fifth and seventh floors of the building.

“It makes it difficult to collaborate,” she said. “We don’t even have a large enough meeting space for community meetings.”

The added space will also allow an onsite pharmacy for study drugs, clinical exam rooms and space for community education. It will enable the researchers to enroll more study participants and to process them more efficiently.