Wake Forest University is slated to receive a $1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services which will be used toward completion of another floor of the Center for Research on Human Nutrition and Chronic Disease Prevention.
The grant was included in last fall''s omnibus appropriations bill at the behest of then Sen. Lauch Faircloth and Rep. Richard Burr. The money is from a federal construction program of the Health Services Research Administration that pays for health care facilities and research centers.
The funds, along with school funds, will be used to finish the fourth floor of the building, which will be used for cancer research, much of it focusing on nutrition and cancer.
Last fall, the school also received a $943,666 matching grant from the National Institutes of Health to complete the fifth floor of the building. That floor will be used to establish an imaging center to be used in conjunction with the existing Positron Emission Tomography (PET) program for studies of behavioral disorders associated with chronic disease in animal models.
The two floors are expected to be built at the same time.
The sixth floor, the top level of the 11-story Nutrition Center tower, opened in September, housing a transgenic animal facility, taking advantage of a research technique on the forefront of medicine. The use of transgenic rodents – mice or rats bred with a specific gene added, removed or altered – is becoming widespread in biomedical and disease-oriented research.
Several Nutrition Center investigators already are making significant use of transgenic rodents, and more studies are on the way. Investigators of blood pressure, obesity and diabetes make heavy use of a genetically engineered strain of transgenic rats with high blood pressure caused by insertion of a gene that makes their blood pressure sensitive to dietary salt.
Researchers from the Departments of Cancer Biology, Radiation Oncology and Biochemistry are expected to move into the new fourth floor laboratories.
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Contact: Robert Conn or Jim Steele at (336) 716-4587