EUGENE, Ore. -- (June 2, 2010) -- Six projects involving collaborators from the University of Oregon and the local medical community will receive seed grants under a new Translational Research Award Program funded by the Sacred Heart Medical Center Foundation and the University of Oregon.

The six grants, totaling $60,000, will jump start joint research projects that target the heart-health-related benefits of long-term physical activity for aging people, the impacts and treatment of sports-related concussions, the emergence and importance of a protein vital to the health of babies, blood and gas exchange between heart and lungs during exercise, improved diagnostics for sepsis, and web-based interactive therapy for people who have suffered brain injury or strokes.

The Translational Research Award Program is designed to foster the development of non-traditional research teams by awarding seed grants to help investigators pursue ideas and gather preliminary data that will position them to apply for larger grants through the National Institutes of Health (NIH) or other sources.

Eventually, such collaborations could lead to new therapeutic interventions, medical devices or diagnostic techniques, with the overall goal of decreasing the amount of time it takes to move new medical knowledge from the academic environment to the clinical environment. Studies indicate that it can take as long as 17 years before a new medical treatment or device is available at a hospital or clinic.

The Translational Research Award Program was created after leaders within PeaceHealth, which operates Sacred Heart Medical Center, and the UO surveyed academic researchers and clinicians to determine whether there was interest in pursuing a formal research program among Sacred Heart Medical Center, community physicians and university faculty. After receiving a high level of interest in the proposed collaboration, PeaceHealth and the UO moved forward with establishing the funds necessary to start the program.

“The Translational Research Award Program is a very tangible example of the power of philanthropy,” explained Augie Sick, Chair of the Sacred Heart Foundation Board’s Research, Education and Collaboration Committee, and a key philanthropic donor to the newly created research program. “We can have the greatest ideas and the best of intentions, but nothing would be possible without the financial support of a community that believes in those ideas and intentions.”

The UO’s share of the funding comes from the Office of the Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies through a donation from Lorry I. Lokey in 2007 to the UO Foundation to establish the Scientific Advancement and Graduate Education Initiative (SAGE). A portion of SAGE supports interdisciplinary efforts in the life sciences and translational research devoted to elevating human health.

An application and peer review process was used to award translational program funds to the research teams, which are made up of at least one academic researcher and one clinician.

"The number and quality of the proposals received by the review committee in this inaugural effort are testimony to the potential impact of programs of this type," said Gary Klug, professor and former head of the UO's human physiology department. "By assisting translational research, the awards also contribute to meeting the goals of the UO’s recently established Health and Human Performance Initiative."

That initiative, part of the university's Big Idea’s program, holds that human performance spans the spectrum of physiological function from athletes to patients who have severe ambulatory problems. It is hoped, for example, that research on elite performers can provide valuable information on diseases and treatments.

The six projects chosen and recipients are:

• Brain function recovery of young athletes after concussion, led by Dr. Michael Koester, Slocum Center for Orthopedics and Sports Medicine, and Li-Shan Chou, professor of human physiology. In collaboration with the Eugene and Bethel school districts, researchers will seek to better identify and understand lingering impairments of concussions suffered by athletes and to improve assessment and rehabilitation programs. High school athletes who suffer concussions and a control group of uninjured subjects will undergo testing. Researchers will focus on gait analyses — how students walk — and their attention deficits in orientation and execution as they move, as well as their cognitive and physical functions during recovery.

• Role of the alkaline phosphatase protein in early development of human intestines, led by Dr. Rebecca C. Bent, a neonatal specialist at Sacred Heart Medical Center at RiverBend, and Karen Guillemin, professor of biology and member of the UO Institute of Molecular Biology. Researchers will measure the protein in the stool of newborns of different gestational ages to determine if age correlates with levels produced in the neonatal intestine. Studies of zebrafish have found the protein detoxifies lipopolysaccharide, a pro-inflammatory component of cell walls of Gram-negative bacteria. In zebrafish, deficits in the protein result in excessive inflammatory responses to resident gut bacteria. Researchers hope to pinpoint the protein's emergence in infants and explore whether deficits in the protein are linked to disease, such as necrotizing enterocolitis.

• Exercise, histamine receptors and vascular function in aging, John R. Halliwill, associate professor of human physiology, and Dr. Richard C. Padgett, executive medical director of Oregon Heart & Vascular Institute at RiverBend. Halliwill and Padgett are looking at the benefits of endurance exercise training to cardiovascular health (heart and blood flow) in people as they age. They propose to build on Halliwill's long-running research by focusing on the connection of intramuscular histamine receptors to improvements in the inner lining of blood vessels and vascular function. By way of a short-term project with human subjects, they hope to identify a key pathway and possibly the mechanism involved in such improvements and pursue a larger federally funded project.

• Understanding the regulation of shunt vessels in the lungs of healthy humans, led by Andrew Lovering, UO professor of human physiology, and Dr. Mathews Fish, director of nuclear medicine at Oregon Heart & Vascular Institute at RiverBend. Lovering and Fish are seeking to understand the regulation of inducible intrapulmonary arteriovenous anastomoses – blood vessels that open under certain conditions like exercise, to reroute blood flow through the lung. These pathways are linked to a reduction in the ability of the lungs to get oxygen into the blood and to conditions that increase susceptibility to migraines, ischemia of brain tissues and strokes. They will seek to identify the mechanisms that control blood flow through shunt vessels under both high and low oxygen conditions.

• Development of simple, rapid tests to diagnose sepsis and its severity level, led by Dr. Robert Pelz, who specializes in infectious diseases and internal medicine for PeaceHealth Medical Group, and Michael F. Marusich of MitoSciences Inc., a UO biotechnology spinoff. This pilot study will evaluate the ability of MitoSciences' prototype tests that measure activities of mitochondrial proteins in blood to detect and monitor the progression of sepsis. If the tests show diagnostic utility, the researchers will pursue federal funding for a larger, definitive clinical study of improved diagnostic devices. Sepsis, a severe whole body inflammation that can be caused by infection or trauma, is linked to 9 percent of deaths in the United States annually.

• Development of web-based assistive tools to enhance community independence in patients with cognitive impairments due to brain injury or stroke, led by McKay Moore Sohlberg, UO professor of special education and clinical sciences; Stephen Fickas, UO professor of computer and information sciences; and PeaceHealth speech-language pathologist Linda Lorig. They will work with PeaceHealth clinicians and patients to expand the functionality of a web-based prompting system that delivers navigation reminders on web-capable cellular phones. They will develop an interface that allows therapists to select and evaluate prompts designed to increase self-monitoring and awareness in people with cognitive impairments.

• Collaborations between UO scientists and area clinicians date to the 1950s and have steadily increased in number and sophistication over subsequent decades," Klug said. "Early work focused on children’s growth and development, prevention and treatment of orthopedic injuries and the vulnerability to falls in older adults."

Historically, he said, the connections were done solely on personal, one-to-one pursuits based on mutual interests. "However, with the advent of the Translational Award Program, new projects will not only receive critical financial support to jump start important research, but investigators will now have an organized, efficient mechanism that can be far more efficacious in identifying collaborators for their work," Klug said. "The partnership between the UO and local clinicians provide an environment where these unique collateral benefits can occur on a regular basis."