$10.1 million NIH award marks largest USC has received from agency
The National Institute of Health (NIH) has awarded USC a $10.1 million grant to establish the Center for Dietary Supplements and Inflammation.
That’s the largest single grant the university has received from the agency, which funds USC’s research with about $30 million in grants each year, said Prakash Nagarkatti, USC’s vice president for research.
The new center will continue previous research on the effects of chronic inflammation and how to prevent it. Inflammation is an extremely important tool for the body to fight infections, but it can get out of control, too, and cause a range of health problems — from allergies to multiple sclerosis. Emerging research has begun to show that those problems can include diabetes, Alzheimer’s and cancer, as well.
The new center will work to advance that research by focusing on learning more about the inflammation process and how to prevent the wide range of diseases caused by it and on developing new medications to control chronic inflammation, Nagarkatti said.
Nagarkatti will also serve as a co-director for the center with his wife, Mitzi Nagarkatti, the chairwoman of the department of pathology, microbiology and immunology at the School of Medicine.
The center’s main office will be housed in the School of Medicine, but it will integrate faculty from six of USC’s colleges, including the Arnold School of Public Health and the College of Nursing.
A total of 16 junior faculty members from those colleges will be trained under the grant, which, Prakash Nagarkatti said, will be split over five years.
Prakash Nagarkatti said he hopes the diversity of the new faculty members will allow for more interdisciplinary research and, ultimately, lead it to be more successful.
In 2007, USC received a similar grant of $6 million from the NIH to establish a center for botanicals and inflammation that focused on how plant materials are used to treat inflammation, Prakash Nagarkatti said.
Since then, the center has published more than 50 scientific papers on the subject.
“This center award has had a dramatic effect on enhancing worldwide visibility of inflammation research being conducted at USC,” he said, citing coverage by media like PBS, MSNBC and The Boston Herald.
The success of the 2007 center was one of the reasons USC was chosen for this one, Prakash Nagarkatti said.
“We won because we had set the stage through our previous successful $6 million grant and high-quality research,” he said.
The grant will have an impact on more than just research at USC, Prakash Nagarkatti said, including on the state’s job market.
“USC will be recognized as a national and international leader in inflammation research,” he said. “In 2010, the total sales of the global pharmaceutical market were estimated at $600 billion and are believed to expand to over $975 billion by 2013.
“Thus, research on inflammation leading to drug discovery at USC is expected to have major economic impact on our state.”
The grant will also help unify the university’s research and help the center compete for more grants, as well as provide training and jobs for students in biomedical research, Prakash Nagarkatti said.