UC San Diego is partnering with The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) to develop new methods to treat and prevent kidney failure. UAB’s Division of Nephrology has been awarded a five-year, $4.23 million George M. O’Brien Kidney Research Center grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). UC San Diego will receive approximately $400,000 each year. Together, UC San Diego and UAB will form one of only eight O’Brien centers in the United States.

“The award of an O'Brien Kidney Center and having UCSD/UAB receive the best score in this round of awards is a tremendous honor for these institutions,” said Ravindra Mehta, M.D., F.A.C.P., Professor of Clinical Medicine, Division of Nephrology, Associate Chair for Clinical Research, Department of Medicine, and Associate Director, General Clinical Research Center, UCSD Medical Center. “This designates UCSD/UAB as leading universities in kidney research in the United States.”

“This combined thematic approach will facilitate acute kidney injury research at UAB and UC San Diego and allow for translational studies to be accomplished and will help enhance collaboration among basic and clinical researchers in the field of kidney disease,” said principal investigator, Anupam Agarwal, M.D., director of UAB’s nephrology division.

“Modern research, as envisioned by National Institutes of Health, is highly complex, expensive and requires a diversity of talents working together to accomplish true progress,” said Roland Blantz, M.D., Professor of Medicine and Chief, Division of Nephrology-Hypertension, UC San Diego School of Medicine. “This newly awarded center will provide expertise in clinically relevant and more basic research that will be shared in collaboration with potentially 40 other laboratories, nationally and internationally. We are working together to avoid duplication of talents and techniques with the goal of answering questions that will ultimately prevent acute kidney injury and the progressive loss of kidney function.”

The center's activities will incorporate four thematic areas of research: acute kidney injury in the ICU setting, renal vascular dysfunction and hemodynamic alterations, biomarker discovery, and genetic susceptibility. The center will consist of three biomedical research cores and a biostatistics/bioinformatics resource:

UC San Diego will use this grant to cooperate with campus investigators, affiliated biotech institutions, and other recognized nephrologists and clinicians in the San Diego area. The UCSD/UAB Kidney Center is the only center with a major clinical core directed toward research in human patients and not just experimental animal or cell culture studies.

UC San Diego School of Medicine will lead a $60 million, five-year, 10-site Clinical Consortium funded by the Department of Defense Psychological Health/Traumatic Brain Injury Research Program (DoD PH/TBI) to conduct studies leading to the prevention and treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and traumatic brain injury (TBI), two prevalent but poorly understood battlefield-related disorders that affect millions of individuals, both military and civilian.

Murray B. Stein, M.D., M.P.H., Professor of Psychiatry and Family and Preventive Medicine at UC San Diego and Staff Psychiatrist at the Veterans Affairs San Diego Health System (VASDHS), will direct the multi-center Clinical Consortium. Ronald G. Thomas, Ph.D., Professor of Family and Preventive Medicine and Neurosciences and Director of the Division of Biostatistics at UC San Diego, is co-principal investigator of the Consortium.

This nationwide network of study sites will test new therapies to prevent illness and enhance recovery in individuals at risk for adverse psychological, emotional and cognitive outcomes resulting from a traumatic injury, and for individuals who have already developed chronic neuropsychiatric problems because of an injury. The program will also focus on the short- and long-term symptoms caused by mild head injuries, which Stein says are not well understood in the treatment of military or civilian populations.

In addition to overseeing the Clinical Consortium, UC San Diego Medical Center is also one of the participating study sites, with Raul Coimbra, M.D., Ph.D., Professor of Surgery and Director of the UC San Diego Division of Trauma, Burns and Critical Care leading the San Diego TBI/PTSD Clinical Research Center.

"The focus of the San Diego TBI/PTSD Clinical Research Site will be on the integration of all aspects of trauma, neurosurgical, neurological, psychological, and psychiatric care into an organized network to allow population-based research," said Coimbra. "The leadership provided by UC San Diego trauma, neurosurgery, and psychiatry specialists in trauma care and injury-related research over the last 20 years makes this the ideal setting to conduct this type of research, especially with the Veterans Affairs San Diego Health System (VASDHS) and our regional military hospitals providing opportunities for partnership as we develop our study protocols."

"This consortium exemplifies the university’s culture of innovation and multi-disciplinary collaboration," said UC San Diego Chancellor Mary Anne Fox. "We are proud to lead this consortium, and have our researchers and clinicians work together to solve medical mysteries, and find new treatments and therapies that will improve lives. This consortium is yet another example of the local impact, national influence and global reach of UC San Diego."