EPA Announced an Award of $9 million to Establish Two Cutting-edge Environmental Bioinformatics Research Centers
EPA announced an award of $9 million to
establish two cutting-edge environmental
bioinformatics research centers.
EPA announced an award of $9 million to establish two cutting-edge
environmental bioinformatics research centers at the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Medicine and
Dentistry of New Jersey. The centers represent a major component of
EPA’s computational toxicology program that is using computer models to
study the relationship between environmental contaminants and their
potential adverse effects.
The university-based research centers
will augment EPA’s research at its National Center for Computational
Toxicology (NCCT), established in 2004 in Research Triangle Park, N.C.
EPA will coordinate efforts with the centers to advance the science of
computational toxicology.
“The valuable contributions to
environmental bioinformatics that these universities will make with
these EPA grants will increase our ability to quickly and effectively
assess and protect human health and the environment,” said E. Timothy
Oppelt, acting assistant administrator for EPA’s Office of Research and
Development. “Their expertise is exceptional and we anticipate these
new research centers will greatly advance bioinformatics in the field
of environmental science,” he said.
Bioinformatics is the use of computers
in biological research to analyze or predict molecular composition and
evaluate changes to genes and proteins in an organism. The research
conducted by the university centers will focus on how chemicals can
adversely affect health and the environment and provide predictive
models to screen and test chemicals, as well as improve human health
and ecological risk assessments.
“The multidisciplinary research approach
at these two centers will lead to more efficient and effective
assessment of the hazards and risk of chemicals to humans and the
environment and has the potential to reduce the use of animals in
toxicological testing,” said Robert Kavlock, director of EPA’s National
Center for Computation Toxicology.
The Research Center for Environmental
Bioinformatics and Computational Toxicology at the University of
Medicine & Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ) in Piscataway will bring
together a team of computational scientists with diverse backgrounds in
bioinformatics, chemistry, modeling, and environmental studies from
UMDNJ, Rutgers, and Princeton Universities, and the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration’s Center for Toxicoinformatics. View Presentation (PDF, 53 pp, 4.8 MB, About PDF
)
The Carolina Environmental
Bioinformatics Research Center at the University of North Carolina,
Chapel Hill, brings together many researchers and disciplines,
combining expertise in biostatistics, computational biology, chemistry,
and computer science to advance the field of computational toxicology. View Presentation (PDF, 44 pp, 2.8 MB, About PDF)
The grant awards for each center will be
$4.5 million for five years. The centers are funded through the EPA’s
Science to Achieve Results (STAR) program and managed by the EPA’s
National Center for Environmental Research.
For more information, visit the Web site at: www.epa.gov/ncer/2005bioinformatics. To learn more about the EPA’s overall program in computational toxicology, visit: www.epa.gov/comptox.
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