UAMS Infectious Disease Researchers Awarded $5.7 Million COBRE Grant Extension

The National Institute of General Medical Sciences within the National Institutes of Health awarded an additional $5.7 million, five-year grant to fund the third and final phase of a University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences program that supports infectious disease research.

This final phase of the Centers for Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE) grant is for the 11th through 15th years of the program, which since 2012 has now received more than $26 million in federal funding.

“The goal of the COBRE grants is to establish a center of research excellence around a specific scientific theme that will ultimately become self-sustaining, and in our case this theme is broadly focused on the growing problem of infectious disease,” said Mark Smeltzer, PhD, a professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology and the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery in the UAMS College of Medicine.

In 2012, UAMS was awarded more than $10 million for the first phase of the program, which allowed Smeltzer and Richard Morrison, PhD, to establish the UAMS Center for Microbial Pathogenesis and Host Inflammatory Responses to focus on diverse microbial pathogens — bacteria, viruses and parasites — and the impact of the host response that these pathogens elicit in humans.

“The goal is to understand the pathogen and the host response to a point that allows us to manipulate the interaction between the two in favor of the host and the desired therapeutic outcome,” said Smeltzer, director of the center.

Working with Morrison, who at the time was chair of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology and served as co-director of Phase I, this “allowed us to start recruiting outstanding young investigators we wouldn’t have been able to recruit otherwise,” said Smeltzer. “It was their success in developing their own independent research programs that allowed us to build our center and obtain an additional $11 million in 2017 to fund Phase II, and it was our continued success in Phase II that allowed us to obtain this additional funding for Phase III.”

Smeltzer said that “to date, we have recruited 10 new investigators to UAMS and Arkansas, and one of the things I’m proudest of is that all of these investigators are still here,” which Smeltzer noted is “particularly important to me personally both as a long-time faculty member at UAMS and a native Arkansan.”

 

05/16/2022