News Release

By DAVID WILLIAMSON
UNC News Services

CHAPEL HILL — Like smoking, obesity causes more unnecessary suffering and premature death in the United States each year than all hurricanes, auto accidents and terrorist acts combined. Through excessive overeating and inactivity, many millions of people, including children, boost the chance that they will suffer strokes, heart attacks, diabetes, joint problems, cancer and numerous other painful, life-threatening maladies.

In an effort to reduce obesity’s staggering toll, the National Institutes of Health has awarded a major grant to University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill health scientists to plan and establish a special research-oriented Inter-Disciplinary Obesity Center.

The grant is one of three from NIH’s National Center for Research Resources that will fund major initiatives at UNC to perform cutting edge research. The two others will focus on newest and most central targets of modern medicine – inflammation and genetic abnormalities. Funds for the Chapel Hill campus are expected to total more than $5 million over the next three years and will likely be renewed and increased considerably after that as the Unhiversity creates interdisciplinary centers in each area. The first funds will pay chiefly for planning.

Only 21 such grants were awarded in the United States, according to Dr. Elias A. Zerhouni, NIH director. No other university earned three of them.

"At Carolina, one of our greatest strengths is our ability to conduct the kind of research that brings different fields of knowledge to bear on complex problems in science at the same time," said Dr. Tony Waldrop, vice chancellor for research and economic development at UNC. "These three impressive planning awards demonstrate the excellence of our researchers and their ability to address real-world issues of the highest national priority.

"The fact that Carolina is getting three of them when NIH awarded only 21 nationally really shows the quality of the faculty and the work being done here," Waldrop said. "We understand NIH originally received more than 100 proposals for funding from top research groups across the country, and competition for support was very strong."

The grants are part of the agency’s "Roadmap for Medical Research," a series of initiatives designed to transform the nation's medical research capabilities and speed the movement of research discoveries from the bench to the bedside, he said. The program provides a framework for NIH funding priorities and represents an attempt to make the country’s medical research system more efficient and productive. UNC will receive other Roadmap funding this year for other projects as well.

Dr. Barry M. Popkin, professor of nutrition at the UNC schools of public health and medicine and a fellow at UNC’s Carolina Population Center, will direct the new obesity center.

"This is a major coup for UNC," Popkin said. "We are glad to see Duke University also received one, and so the Triangle got 20 percent of those awarded nationally. For UNC to get three is just enormous. All of us in the research community here are very excited about what has happened and about the future."

The long-term goal of the center he leads will be to develop effective ways of preventing and treating obesity that can be used anywhere in the country, he said. Obesity is particularly a problem in North Carolina and throughout the South.

" Our vision for this NIH Roadmap planning grant is to build on the collaborative environment at UNC," Popkin said. "That includes departments that cross the schools of public health and medicine, Allied Health Sciences, the College of Arts and Sciences and NIH-funded centers that already are addressing the obesity epidemic, including the Clinical Nutrition Research Center, Carolina Population Center, the Center for Environmental Health & Susceptibility and the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center.

"Researchers who will be engaged in this effort come from nutrition, epidemiology, health behavior, urban planning, economics, physiology, psychology, psychiatry, genetics and clinical medicine."

Included will be leading scholars organized in seven overlapping topical clusters who will meet regularly to develop a common language, identify needs and design and plan specific research projects, he said. Top university administrators have committed themselves to helping overcome barriers to interdisciplinary programs so investigators can have the resources, time and space to achieve the center’s goals.

Dr. R. Balfour Sartor, professor of medicine and of microbiology and immunology and director of UNC’s Multidisciplinary Center for Inflammatory Bowel Disease and Treatment, will plan and lead the new imaging program with help from Dr. Etta Pisano, professor of radiology and biomedical engineering and chief of breast imaging at UNC Hospitals. That grant to the UNC School of Medicine will explore "Non-invasive approaches in assessing inflammation" and support research on imaging methods using resources available on campus as part of the Biomedical Research Imaging Center that Pisano directs.

"Our goal is to take advantage of the existing technologies known as computed tomography -- or CT scanning -- and magnetic resonance imaging, also known as MRI, which create images inside the body, and extend their usefulness significantly," Sartor said. "Right now, MRI, for example, looks nonspecifically at anatomy but doesn’t show function. We plan to develop probes that would, in novel ways, link to molecular targets that are selectively increased in parts of the body that are inflamed.

"By improving on these valuable technologies, we hope among other things to eliminate the need for doctors to take biopsies of joints and internal organs such as kidney, liver, brain or blood vessels to diagnose and monitor illnesses," he said. "We also hope eventually be able to be totally non-invasive and avoid use of scopes -- colonoscopy in the intestines and endoscopy in the throat."

With improved, totally safe new methods, doctors could simply inject materials into patients’ veins, scan their bodies repeatedly and not only determine where inflammation was located, but also its degree and determine over time whether it was getting better or worse following treatment, Sartor said. "Particularly in children, we want to do as few invasive procedures as we can."

As currently envisioned, researchers would use antibodies that selectively bind to molecules present in inflamed tissues or blood cells, he said. One such "tag," the non-radioactive molecule gadolinium, would be chemically linked to antibodies that would find their own way to the inflamed sites and attach themselves there temporarily.

Among patients who might benefit most would be those with such genetically linked illnesses as Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis and rheumatoid arthritis, Sartor said. In theory, with early treatment, doctors could prevent or delay onset of symptoms in people with early, pre-clinical stages of inflammation.

"We are extremely gratified about this new NIH support, which reflects an appreciation of the excellence of UNC programs already in place and generous University support," he said. "Our activities will involve more than 60 investigators and at least nine departments, seven centers, five schools, three universities and the Environmental Protection Agency."

Dr. Daniel A. Reed, vice chancellor for information technology at UNC and Chancellor’s Eminent Professor, will direct the new Carolina Center for Exploratory Genetic Analysis. His co-principal investigator will be Dr. Terry Magnuson, director of UNC’s Genome Science Center and Sarah Graham Kenan professor and chair of genetics. Much of the work will rely in various ways on the power of computers.

"Our center will establish an interdisciplinary infrastructure for efficiently identifying the complex genetic traits underlying human diseases based on clinical studies, population studies and model systems," Reed said. "The planning stage for this will build a collaborative community of investigators. It also will conduct family linkage studies such as susceptibility to alcoholic addiction, expression profile studies such as with breast cancer and public health studies such as those related to heart disease."

Those efforts will rely on the combined expertise of three complementary groups of UNC scientists, he said. They are experimental geneticists, experts in statistics and biostatistics and computer scientists with expertise in algorithm development, software construction, and high-performance computing.

To reduce the barriers between data providers and data analyzers, he and colleagues will organize a series of intensive, specialized workshops, colloquia and intramural meetings.

"We believe the next major breakthroughs in our understanding of biology and disease will come from the integrated analysis of genetic data and its expression in people," he said. "To accommodate the diverse, multi-investigator data bases necessary to answer key health questions, we will develop a prototype, extensible data model and provide access to data researchers can easily use."

Among new methods the scientists will refine and employ to analyze genetic traits are oligogenic analysis, multivariate linkage analysis, epistasis, subspace clustering and association analysis.

"For the interactive use of these computationally intensive techniques, we will explore new ways of visualizing the data and develop high-performance ways of using them," said Reed, also founding director of the new interdisciplinary Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI), which is based at UNC in partnership with Duke and N.C. State universities.

Reed, a member of President Bush’s Information Technology Advisory Committee, will continue leading RENCI, which explores the interactions of computing technology with the arts, humanities, sciences and engineering. The institute will partner with business leaders to enhance the competitiveness of North Carolina industries.

"We are managing the new center’s activities through RENCI," Reed said. "Creating the institute enabled us to pursue and win this valuable award."

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News Services contacts: David Williamson, (919) 962-8596; Karen Moon, 962-8595 (broadcast)