UCI Medical Center Wins Grant : Science: $3.8-million federal award will enable the facility to develop a child developmental disability clinic.
UCI Medical Center has received a $3.8-million federal grant to develop a core facility for the study and treatment of children with developmental disabilities, becoming one of only two institutions in the state to receive the much-coveted award.
With the grant, UCI joins the ranks of such institutions as UCLA and Harvard Medical School in pursuing a coordinated program of research that will meld expertise in everything from Down’s syndrome to attention deficit disorder.
“A major goal of the center is . . . to get individuals talking together who would not have crossed paths before,” said Dr. Anne Spence, an medical geneticist who is medical director of UCI’s Mental Retardation Research Center.
“It gives us an active bridge to reinforce the ties between the clinical people at the medical center [in Orange] and the basic-research people on campus . . . ensuring the enrichment of research.”
Only 14 institutions in the country currently have the five-year grants, initiated in 1963 by President John F. Kennedy. UCI is among four to receive one this year.
National health officials said they were impressed by UCI’s scientific strengths-- particularly its studies into how the brain recovers from injury--as well as its administrative skills.
“What they are proposing is on the cutting edge of science,” said Dr. Felix de la Cruz of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, which awards the grants.
Chancellor Laurel L. Wilkening said the grant boosts the university’s efforts to become a top-level research institution by century’s end. Slightly more than a year ago, UCI Medical Center received a similar leg-up when the National Cancer Institute named it a national cancer center, a prized designation also emphasizing coordination of clinical and basic research.
But the new award is not just a coup for the ivory tower, the chancellor said. “I think this will be good for the community,” she said. “We will have some things going on that the community can look to for resources.”
The grant will fund public lectures and will enhance researchers abilities’ to include local children and their families in research projects, UCI scientists said.
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The award is important not so much for the money it provides as for the infrastructure it establishes among various researchers, campuses and departments, Spence said. For example, it will fund a computer database that will enhance communication between the Orange and Irvine campuses.
The database is just one tool UCI can use to attract more research dollars and, ultimately, more researchers, Spence said.
Ongoing projects will benefit from the interdisciplinary approach as well, Spence said. Among those are Spence’s own exploration into the role of genes in autism and Dr. Ira Lott’s research into the links between Down’s syndrome and Alzheimer’s disease.
“It’s been a dream of mine that UCI would be awarded a federal grant like this,” said Lott, chairman of the department of pediatrics. “It will provide the research facilities to allow new collaborations to be developed . . . and enhance the research of individuals already funded.”
What turned the heads of federal health officials were the university’s accomplishments in the neurosciences, particularly in the area of neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to adapt to or recover from injury. A pioneer in this area is Dr. Carl Cotman, a psychobiologist who has studied cell death in Alzheimer’s patients.
“If we can piece together how the brain tissues recover, say, from . . . injuries, hypoxia [oxygen deprivation], we may be able to prevent or mitigate the effects,” De la Cruz said.
Spence and other researchers said it is a common misconception that so-called “mental retardation” is largely inborn or untreatable. But science has not borne that out.
“It’s wrong for two reasons,” she said. “First, we’ve learned to ameliorate conditions in a number of situations. And we’ve learned an awful lot about prevention.”
Spence cited the cases of fetal alcohol syndrome--entirely preventable--and that of phenylketonuria, a metabolic disorder which, left untreated, leads to brain damage but which can be controlled through dietary modification.
Researchers’ findings will have implications even outside the area of developmental disabilities, Spence said.
“Scientists like to say we are learning how the brain works by looking at how it doesn’t,” she said. The grant will provide UCI with “real tools in learning . . . to understand the brain.”
