University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) early career researchers Joshua Kennedy, M.D., and Taren Swindle, Ph.D., are recipients of National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants that will support their work over the next several years.

In May, Kennedy, whose laboratory is at Arkansas Children’s Research Institute (ACRI) on the Arkansas Children’s Hospital campus, received notice of a five-year $877,000 NIH National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases K08 Award. He is an assistant professor of internal medicine and pediatrics, UAMS College of Medicine Department of Pediatrics, Division of Allergy and Immunology.

Swindle, an assistant professor in the College of Medicine Department of Family and Preventive Medicine, was recently notified she will receive a four-year, $442,583 NIH National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Disease K01 Award.

Kennedy’s grant provides salary and laboratory support for his investigation into how allergies and rhinovirus infections (common colds) work in tandem to create life-threatening symptoms for people with asthma. He will work with patients who experience critical asthma symptoms as a result of rhinovirus infections and allergies, and he will conduct laboratory experiments on donated lung tissue.

The K08 Award program is an intensive, supervised research career development experience, preparing clinical researchers such as Kennedy for careers that have a significant impact on the health-related research needs of the country.

Swindle’s research involves the study of a childcare-based nutrition intervention and development of a strategy for implementing the intervention. She will pilot test the implementation strategy and the intervention’s effect on child health outcomes. 

The K01 award is designed to advance Swindle’s expertise and skills in implementation science, child and community nutrition, and community engagement. To help achieve her goals, she will take part in a comprehensive plan of mentored research, didactic education, cross-disciplinary collaborations and structured field studies.

Kennedy and Swindle said their awards were made possible by two years of research support and training they received through the UAMS Translational Research Institute’s KL2 Mentored Research Career Development Scholar Award Program. Kennedy and Swindle were selected for the competitive KL2 program in 2013 and 2014, respectively. 

“The KL2 provided the funds necessary to produce the preliminary data that supported the NIH K08,” Kennedy said. “The grant was reviewed by all of my KL2 award mentors, and the CTSA (NIH Clinical and Translational Science Award) consortium organized a special K club that provided valuable feedback and ultimately helped my application get funded.” 

The KL2 has provided Swindle with training experiences in nutrition, grant writing, and qualitative methods that were critical to her conceptualization of the K01 grant and strengthening her qualifications as a K01 candidate, she said. 

“The protected time for mentored research on the KL2 also allowed me to secure important preliminary data that I was able to use in my K01 application,” she added. “The review committee specifically mentioned my KL2 experience as a strength in my review.” 

UAMS is the state’s only comprehensive academic health center, with colleges of Medicine, Nursing, Pharmacy, Health Professions and Public Health; a graduate school; a hospital; a northwest Arkansas regional campus; a statewide network of regional centers; and seven institutes: the Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute, the Jackson T. Stephens Spine & Neurosciences Institute, the Myeloma Institute, the Harvey & Bernice Jones Eye Institute, the Psychiatric Research Institute, the Donald W. Reynolds Institute on Aging and the Translational Research Institute. It is the only adult Level 1 trauma center in the state. UAMS has 3,021 students, 789 medical residents and two dental residents. It is the state’s largest public employer with more than 10,000 employees, including about 1,000 physicians and other professionals who provide care to patients at UAMS, Arkansas Children’s Hospital, the VA Medical Center and UAMS regional centers throughout the state. Visit www.uams.edu or www.uamshealth.com. Find us on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or Instagram.

Arkansas Children’s Hospital (ACH) is the only pediatric medical center in Arkansas and one of the largest in the United States serving children from birth to age 21. Over the past century, ACH has grown from a small orphanage in Little Rock to a statewide network of care that includes an expansive pediatric teaching hospital and research institute, as well as regional clinics in several counties. ACH also reaches children across the state and nation through a range of telemedicine capabilities that ensures every child has access to the best care available, regardless of location or resources. The hospital’s campus in Little Rock spans 36 city blocks and is licensed for 359 beds. ACH has a staff of 505 physicians, more than 200 residents in pediatrics and pediatric specialties and more than 4,000 employees. A campus under development in northwest Arkansas will bring 233,613 square feet of inpatient beds, clinic rooms and diagnostic services to children in that region of the state. A private nonprofit, ACH boasts an internationally renowned reputation for medical breakthroughs and intensive treatments, unique surgical procedures and forward-thinking research — all dedicated to fulfilling its mission of championing children by making them better today and healthier tomorrow. For more info, visit archildrens.org.

ACRI is a free-standing state-of-the-art pediatric research center which provides a research environment on the ACH campus to foster research and scholarship of faculty members of University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences who are investigating questions relative to development, disease and treatment as it relates to the health of infants, children and adolescents. Physician and biomedical scientist investigators at ACRI and the Arkansas Children’s Nutrition Center (ACNC) conduct clinical, basic science, and health services research for the purpose of treating illnesses and preventing disease and thereby, improving the health of the children of Arkansas and beyond.

A team of University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) researchers has received a federal grant to conduct the first comprehensive study of the dangers posed by synthetic marijuana products.

The $2.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) will enable a seven-member interdisciplinary research team to determine the toxicity of the man-made cannabinoids and inform policymakers as they consider regulating the products, which are intended to mimic the effects of marijuana.

“Synthetic cannabinoid products such as K2 and Spice are deceptively marketed as safe and legal alternatives to marijuana, but admissions to emergency rooms and calls to poison control centers suggest that they are certainly not safe,” said Paul Prather, Ph.D., the study’s principal investigator and professor in the UAMS College of Medicine Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology. “Users of these products are experiencing psychosis, seizures, heart attacks and even death.”

Since 2015, there have been 83 calls for synthetic cannabinoid exposures to the Arkansas Poison & Drug Information Center at UAMS. Synthetic cannabinoids are psychoactive chemicals often sprayed on plants that have been cut up to look like natural marijuana. They are also sold as powders, tablets and capsules.

Over the next five years, the UAMS team will explore why the synthetic compounds are more toxic than marijuana, even though both activate the same cannabinoid receptors in the brain. Researchers will study the effects of the man-made compounds on human cells in the lab, in mice, and in those who take synthetic cannabinoids and are admitted to the ER at UAMS and ERs in New York.

“When we test patients who have used synthetic cannabinoids, we can identify what specific compounds are being abused, the levels of compounds and their metabolites in patient samples, and we can link this information to the symptoms that brought them into the ER,” said co-investigator Laura James, M.D., a professor in the UAMS College of Medicine Department of Pediatrics, director of the UAMS Translational Research Institute, and Section Chief, Clinical Pharmacology and Toxicology at Arkansas Children’s Hospital. “The significance of this grant is that numerous experts are working across disciplines to produce findings that will directly improve human health and safety.”

“Our goal is to provide the public and scientific community definitive information that these compounds are not an alternate form of marijuana that’s safe,” Prather said. “This would give federal and state agencies grounds for further regulating these compounds.”

In addition, he said, the team’s findings could help lead to antidotes for people with synthetic cannabinoid toxicity.

The NIH/NIDA grant builds on the work of a one-year 2011 pilot study that was conducted by largely the same team and was funded by the Translational Research Institute. That study, led by James, resulted in development of a clinical test by co-investigator Jeffery H. Moran, Ph.D., to determine the presence and amount of the toxic synthetic compounds in a person’s body. Their findings also informed the work of the Arkansas Legislature, which in 2013 added new synthetic cannabinoid groups to the state’s list of controlled substances (Act 329).

As part of the new five-year study, Moran, assistant professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology and section director of Environmental Chemistry at the Arkansas Department of Health, will identify the synthetic cannabinoids in blood and urine samples obtained from ER patients.

Co-investigator Anna Radominska-Pandya, Ph.D., will determine what enzymes are metabolizing (inactivating) the synthetic cannabinoids.

“The knowledge gained from this work will help researchers predict whether certain populations are more likely to experience adverse effects from the drugs,” said Radominska-Pandya, a professor in the UAMS College of Medicine Departments of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and Medicine.

Prather will focus on studying the synthetic compounds and metabolites identified from the urine of the ER patients. By analyzing cells expressing human cannabinoid receptors in his lab he will learn which specific synthetic compounds and metabolites bind to the brain’s cannabinoid receptors as well as other aspects of their activity. For example, he said the man-made compounds bind better to cannabinoid receptors and produce greater activity compared to natural marijuana’s main ingredient – tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). These differences in binding and activity may contribute to the synthetic compounds’ toxicity, but researchers don’t yet know the specific culprits.

“No one has ever looked at this,” Prather said. “To this point it’s just conjecture how these compounds and metabolites bind to and activate cannabinoid receptors.”

Prather’s findings will inform the work of co-investigator William Fantegrossi, Ph.D., who will take the compounds and metabolites that bind to the cannabinoid receptors and study their actions in mice.

“Our animal models should help clarify the toxicity associated with these compounds,” said Fantegrossi, associate professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology. “Right now when a synthetic cannabinoid user is admitted to the ER, we don’t know what component of the drug really contributed to their symptoms.”

Co-investigator Susan Abdel-Rahman, Pharm.D., professor of pediatrics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, an expert in pharmacokinetics, will provide consultation to assist Fantegrossi and Moran with their experiments to determine how the synthetic cannabinoids are absorbed, distributed and eliminated in the body.

The research team will be alerted to any surges in synthetic cannabinoid use as well as new cannabinoids that require the team’s study by co-investigator Keith McCain, Pharm.D., associate professor in the UAMS College of Pharmacy and clinical toxicologist in the Arkansas Poison & Drug Information Center, who will be monitoring calls to the UAMS Center.

Keneshia Bryant-Moore, Ph.D., F.N.P., R.N., and Tiffany Haynes, Ph.D., began their research careers as KL2 scholars in 2011 and 2012, respectively. Today they are on solid footing as federally funded researchers.

Bryant-Moore, an associate professor in the Fay W. Boozman College of Public Health, is the principal investigator of a $110,000 Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) award. The funding complements her $1 million 2014 Health Resources and Services Administration grant supporting her effort to bring together Arkansas faith leaders, educators, researchers and health care providers for the annual Community-Campus Partnership Conference.

“The TRI KL2 scholars program launched my research engagement with the faith community which inspired the theme of this year’s conference,” Bryant said. She noted the assistance of Kate Stewart, M.D., M.P.H., and Camille Hart, M.P.H., from TRI’s Community Engagement program. Her collaborators also include Haynes and KL2 alum Brooke Montgomery, Ph.D.

“I am truly grateful for TRI’s support,” she said.

Haynes, an assistant professor in the College of Public Health, was recently awarded $2.1 million for a faith-based mental health intervention in the Delta. Haynes is co-principal investigator with Karen Yeary, Ph.D. Bryant-Moore is a co-investigator, and two other KL2 alums – Dennis Kuo, M.D., M.P.H., and Elvin Price, Pharm.D., Ph.D., are on the project’s steering committee. The five-year NIH grant will allow the team to test the intervention’s effectiveness as well as strategies for sustaining the intervention.

Haynes, a clinical psychologist, said the intervention is led by lay people, helping improve mental well-being through preventive approaches. Anyone experiencing depression or other mental illness will be guided to a mental health professional.

In addition to two years of KL2 support, Haynes said she was aided by TRI’s research forums.

“This intervention can improve the lives of many people, and it wouldn’t have been possible without the support of TRI,” Haynes said.

There are some exciting developments on UAMS’ community engagement front, and we focus on those in the May TRIbune. Our cover story is about TRI’s efforts leading up to UAMS’ first Community Scientist Academy; we’ve held two research information sessions that were well attended by the public, and we are planning more sessions this summer. We also highlight Sarah Facen, a member of TRI’s Community Advisory Board, with our TRI & Me feature. The Academy is the brainchild of Facen, who is a longtime community advocate with deep ties to her South End neighborhood in Little Rock. We also feature two recent successes of our KL2 alums, Keneshia Bryant-Moore, Ph.D., F.N.P., R.N., and Tiffany Haynes, Ph.D., as well as ARresearch.org and your TRI-supported publications.    

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