Nancy Rusch, Ph.D., has been named director of the Translational Research Institute’s (TRI) Education & Career Development Program. Rusch chairs the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology in the College of Medicine. Rusch has mentored medical and graduate students, research and clinical fellows, and junior faculty for more than 25 years, and received several mentoring and teaching awards at UAMS. Graduate School Dean Bobby McGehee, Ph.D., will assist Rusch.

Mary Aitken, M.D., M.P.H., has been named director of TRI’s KL2 Career Development Awards Program. Aitken is a professor in the Department of Pediatrics and director of the Center for Applied Research and Evaluation. Jonathan Dranoff, M.D., chief of the Division of Gastroenterology, will assist with the KL2 program. Aitken and Dranoff, both clinician scientists, will work together to further develop the KL2 program, which seeks to support the career development of promising clinical and basic translational researchers across UAMS.

The Translational Research Institute is offering assistance to researchers through a series of TRI Research Forums. The forums, which will include a panel of research experts, are designed to help those who may have a good research idea but aren’t sure how to proceed and those who may need assistance with grant applications. For more information and to request a forum, email TRIServices@uams.edu or call Amy Jo Jenkins, 501-686-5939.

TRI Research Forums will convene twice monthly. Forum requests must be submitted three weeks prior to the forum date. Those dates are: July 11, 10 a.m. – noon (three-week requirement does not apply to July 11 forum); July 28, 9 – 11 a.m.; Aug. 14, 8:30 – 10:30 a.m.; Aug. 25, 9 – 11 a.m.

View a flyer

This list of funding opportunities was updated June 27 and includes a tab with archived funding opportunities that remain open. It is compiled and updated every two weeks by the Division of Pharmaceutical Evaluation and Policy in the College of Pharmacy.

To help TRI better manage research-related requests and inquiries, the new Translational Research Services Center has its own email address: TRIservices@uams.edu. Overseen by Amy Jo Jenkins, M.S., C.C.R.P., C.C.R.C., C.C.R.A., this email portal will help TRI streamline some of the workflow and ensure that researchers get the help they need when they need it.

As of July 1, the Research Support Center (RSC) was officially integrated into TRI as the Translational Research Services Center, which includes all of the services of the RSC as well as other TRI services (Biostats, Health Data Unit, Clinical Research Services Core, etc.)

For general TRI inquiries not related to resources or services, please continue to use the main TRI email address: TRI@uams.edu.

Lori Frank, Ph.D., program director for Research Integration and Evaluation at the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), will provide an overview of the merit review process at PCORI on June 27, 9-10 a.m., in the UAMS Wilson Education Building, Room 114 A/B.

Since its establishment as part of the Affordable Care Act, PCORI has been funding patient-centered comparative effectiveness research. Frank’s presentation will provide an overview of the merit review process at PCORI including PCORI’s unique requirements for patient-centeredness in research and engagement of patients and other health care stakeholders. Examples to illustrate PCORI’s unique funding strategy will be provided from successful applications. In addition PCORI’s recently launched PCORnet, a major research data infrastructure initiative, will be described, including ways in which PCORnet will contribute to learning healthcare systems.

Frank’s current work is focused on bringing the patient perspective to comparative effectiveness research. Prior to joining PCORI she served as senior research leader and executive director of the Center for Health Outcomes Research with MEDTAP International/ United BioSource Corporation, where she managed the scientific and financial performance of the Center. While there she initiated and served as principal investigator of the Cognition Initiative, a multi-sponsor PRO development consortium and has continued in an advisory role for that work, now part of the Critical Path Institute PRO Consortium. Her career has focused on patient-reported outcomes assessment and she has held research and teaching positions with Georgetown University Department of Psychiatry, the National Institute on Aging, Medimmune, LLC, and the Veteran’s Administration. Frank received graduate degrees from Johns Hopkins University and Pennsylvania State University and completed postdoctoral training in health services research with the Veteran’s Administration and University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS).

TRI will host the Translational Science Team Building Meet and Greet on June 12, 4-6 p.m., in the Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute, 10th floor, Walton Auditorium. This is a great opportunity for all UAMS faculty, including those based at the Arkansas Children’s Research Institute and the VA, who would like to establish new translational research directions or form new collaborations. Bring your 30-second “elevator pitch,” have fun and enjoy some wine.

View a flyer about the event.

TRI’s KL2 Career Development Award recipients from 2009-2013 are (seated l-r) Andrew James and Keneshia Bryant; (standing) Ling Gao, Elvin Price, Anthony Goudie, Joshua Kennedy, Dennis Kuo and Tiffany Haynes. Not pictured, Holly Felix, Brooke Montgomery, and Karen McNiece Redwine.

When UAMS received the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) in 2009, leadership moved quickly to invest in promising new researchers.

With the idea of “growing our own” researchers, the UAMS Translational Research Institute (TRI) has offered annual KL2 Career Development Awards, which provide salary support, research funds, and mentored training to junior investigators. Below are brief updates of the research being conducted by TRI’s KL2 recipients:

2009
Holly Felix, Ph.D., M.P.A.
In addition to studying the impact of obesity in long-term care, Holly Felix is getting traction with her evaluation of the Community Connector Program that links Medicaid-eligible, physically disabled adults and the elderly to long-term care services. Her KL2 helped her disseminate earlier findings that the Community Connector Program could save Arkansas’ Medicaid system $2.6 million over three years. Funded by NIH, Felix is studying the program in 15 counties after Medicaid expanded it from three. She is currently pursuing NIH funding to expand her study of obesity in long-term care.

2010
Dennis Kuo, M.D., M.H.S.
Having set out to solve the complex care needs of patients at Arkansas Children’s Hospital (ACH), Dennis Kuo is thinking big: “You have to redesign the health care system,” he said. Now the principal investigator on two federally funded studies, his data-driven work is helping achieve better understanding of patients’ health needs, family needs, and their health care use patterns. As a result, ACH is developing personal care teams, especially for those with special health care needs, and Kuo was recently tapped to lead the rollout of ACH’s Patient-Centered Medical Home program.

2011
Keneshia Bryant, Ph.D., R.N., F.N.P.-B.C.
Motivated by the patients she saw as a family nurse practitioner, Keneshia Bryant has used her KL2 to better understand the roles of ethnicity, culture and gender on depression. Her research is focused on addressing longstanding mental health barriers in rural African-American communities, including service infrastructure and stigma. She is pursing funding for a faith-based stress management intervention that she developed with the community. Bryant is also co-principal investigator of a federally funded, community-based approach to reducing health disparities and co-investigator on two other mental health studies.

Ling Gao, M.D., Ph.D.
Every Sunday, Ling Gao checks in by phone with her late-stage Merkel cell carcinoma patients. When the dermatologist and researcher recently discussed specific cases, she fought back tears, underscoring her resolve to find treatments for the rare, aggressive skin cancer. With no commercially available cell lines and limited resources, she has personally managed the challenging, daily pursuit of growing cells in her lab. Her reward is now within sight. Using tumor cells derived from her patients, she has identified potential therapeutic targets and will seek to publish her findings this year.

Andrew James, Ph.D.
Using a functional MRI, Andrew James has analyzed the brains of 53 healthy adults, providing a suitable sample size for mapping brain function. The results are most striking in the different ways that healthy people use their brains to accomplish the same mental tasks. His results are being applied to better understand cognitive deficits in a broad range of psychiatric and neurologic illnesses. This foundation is essential to his epilepsy research and has led to new collaborations. He hopes that functional MRIs will one day inform medical decision-making.

Karen McNiece Redwine, M.D., M.P.H.
Searching for ways to more effectively treat children with hypertension – one of the most prevalent chronic diseases in America with significant early morbidity – Karen McNiece Redwine used her KL2 to study the potential benefits of ambulatory blood pressure monitoring. She found that multiple blood pressure readings taken in patients’ natural environments over an extended period resulted in changes to patients’ medication regimen about 40 percent of the time. She presented the findings earlier this month at the Pediatric Academic Society in Vancouver.

2012
Anthony Goudie, Ph.D.
Using national hospital databases, Anthony Goudie is searching for ways to improve hospital quality of care. His KL2 effort is focused on understanding the variation in rates of pediatric hospital-acquired infections such as Clostridium difficile. The challenge of producing apples-to-apples hospital comparisons prompted Goudie to develop a novel risk-adjustment algorithm that has been well received in his field. He has also identified common traits associated with hospitals with low infection rates. He hopes his findings will be used to develop fair incentives to help other pediatric hospitals improve their quality of care.

Tiffany Haynes, Ph.D.
To address mental health disparities in underserved, rural African-Americans, Tiffany Haynes reached out to the strength of the community: Churches. Haynes, a clinical psychologist, has gathered qualitative data from church leaders, other members of the faith community and rural African-Americans to design interventions in which churches can play a key role in decreasing disparities. Haynes is also co-investigator on a Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) grant that is addressing barriers to mental health care in underserved African-American communities.

Brooke EE Montgomery, Ph.D., M.P.H.
While working on an earlier project, Brooke Montgomery, a behavioral scientist, was moved as female survivors of emotional, sexual, and physical violence discussed their subsequent struggles to find safe, healthy relationships with men. Motivated by their stories, she has partner with shelters, treatment facilities, and advocacy and policy groups to design a sexual health intervention program. She is now recruiting women participants who have survived violence, trauma and abuse. Montgomery is also studying how violence against women may impact HIV risk behaviors as part of the national HIV Prevention Trials Network Scholars Program.

2013
Joshua Kennedy, M.D.
As a new KL2 scholar, Joshua Kennedy, an allergy and immunology specialist, is excited to be part of an asthma research team that is conceiving innovative research techniques on a national scale. Using donated living lungs, Kennedy has presented preliminary findings that the airways of asthmatics react differently and perhaps more severely to the common cold than nonasthmatics. He and the team are now trying to tease out the cause of this sometimes fatal phenomenon. Human studies will come next, and Kennedy hopes their work will lead to treatment breakthroughs.

Elvin Price, Pharm.D., Ph.D.
By targeting certain nuclear receptor genes, Elvin Price hopes to someday ensure that individual patients get the safest, most effective medicines for their particular condition. His KL2 has allowed him to focus on genetic associations with blood pressure, lipid and glucose levels. He has identified genes of interest in the lab and then analyzed them in patients. Having completed his first set of analyses of clinical data, Price is seeking to replicate the results in collaboration with the University of Michigan. He is also pursuing studies of treatment-related outcomes over time.

View a chart of the KL2 recipients’ number of publications and grants since their awards.

Editors Note: Sundararaman Swaminathan, M.D., a 2010 recipient, is continuing his diabetes-related research at the University of Virginia, and Wang “Steve” Cheung, M.D., Ph.D., a 2009 recipient, is in private practice in Orlando, Fla.

This list of funding opportunities was updated on May 15 and includes a tab with archived funding opportunities that remain open. It is compiled and updated every two weeks by the Division of Pharmaceutical Evaluation and Policy in the College of Pharmacy.

UAMS IT has 5.7 terabytes of space available to faculty and staff who need data storage for research-related materials. The space is available at no charge and provides security and data protection with daily automated backup. It is available for MS Office or similar (text, etc.), Adobe files, SPSS or SAS files, images, database files and others.

To make your request, use the self-service website http://itss.uams.edu, or email TechSupportCenter@uams.edu.

Read more here about how to make your request.

May 12, 2014 | A potential breakthrough HPV (human papillomavirus) vaccine for women who already have HPV appears to have passed its first major test for Mayumi Nakagawa, M.D., Ph.D., at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS).

The unpublished results of an ongoing Phase I clinical trial are showing “a promising clinical response” to the vaccine and indicate that it is safe, said Nakagawa, associate professor of pathology in the UAMS College of Medicine.

HPV vaccines on the market today are used for preventing HPV only in women who have never had the virus. There is no vaccine for women already infected with HPV.

Nakagawa’s research is funded by a five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). She has also received pilot funding and other support from the UAMS Translational Research Institute, which is a recipient of a NIH National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) Clinical and Translational Sciences Award (CTSA).

Nakagawa will present the results of the first two doses involving 12 women at the 29th International Papillomavirus Conference in August. Recruitment of research participants will continue through 2014, and the Phase I study will conclude in 2015. Preparations toward the Phase II trial are under way, and will mainly examine the vaccine’s effectiveness.

HPV, a sexually transmitted virus, is associated primarily with cervical cancer, the fourth-most common cancer in women worldwide. Cervical cancer is almost always caused by HPV, which also causes anal, oropharyngeal, penile, vaginal and vulvar cancers. It is estimated to be responsible for 5.2 percent of cancer cases in the world.

Nakagawa’s vaccine could benefit women with existing infections and precancerous lesions, and new research indicates that it could significantly reduce the incidence of preterm births. It would do so by giving women an alternative to surgical treatment for HPV-related precancerous lesions such as high-grade squamous epithelial lesions (HSIL). Surgery, Nakagawa notes, was recently found to have the unintended side effect of increasing the incidence of preterm delivery, from 4.4 to 8.9 percent. Therefore, for women who still plan to have children, a therapeutic vaccine such as the one being developed by Nakagawa’s group is likely to become the first line of therapy when it is approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

The vaccine is the culmination of 20 years of research for Nakagawa. HPV has two cancer-causing proteins, and her group found that women who can mount immune responses to one of them called E6 had a much better outcome. Her biggest break came while studying wart treatments, when she learned that a naturally occurring yeast in the body, Candida, had an anti-HPV effect.

Nakagawa’s vaccine, which consists of synthetically made E6 and Candida, would also benefit women in developing regions of the world where surgical expertise may not be available.

“It’s very exciting because it will extend the number of women who can be helped, especially those in low resource areas where HPV disease burden is greatest,” she said.