The National Institutes of Health granted a six-university consortium led by Duke $45 million to establish one of eight national biodefense research centers.
Former Chair of Medicine and current Director of the Human Vaccine Institute Dr. Barton Haynes will lead the southeast's Regional Center of Excellence for Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Disease Research. The NIH funds, part of a greater $350 million campaign for such research, have been distributed across the nationwide group of multidisciplinary centers.
"This is a super grant," said Chair of Medicine Dr. Pascal Goldschmidt. "We have been able to get big grants from the NIH before, but in terms of the magnitude of the grant, this is one of the biggest and most important grants we've ever gotten."
The consorts of Duke, Emory University, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, the University of Florida, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Vanderbilt University and 21 affiliate members, which have been chosen to develop the next generation of vaccines, drugs and diagnostic tests against emerging infections and bioterrorist attacks at the Southeast Regional Center of Excellence for Emerging Infections and Biodefense.
The purpose of the center is to stimulate intellectual dialogue in which a broad range of research on infectious diseases can be initiated.
"A collaboration of this sort on a regional scale is truly unprecedented," Haynes said. "Such a model of collaboration is a very powerful way to do big science on a large scale."
The $45 million will be spread across five years and in addition to funding research in smallpox, anthrax, West Nile Virus and the plague, it will also be used to train personnel to work in biocontainment areas and sponsor research-oriented sabbaticals, Haynes said.
Robert Johnston, a researcher participating in SERCEB and professor of microbiology and immunology at the UNC acknowledged the fact that such a comprehensive initiative to foster advances in biodefense research is a rather daunting task to lead, but hopes the expertise of the researchers involved will lead to a successful project.
"It's an experiment, but in this case it's an experiment that's warranted," Johnston said. "We bring different backgrounds and expertise to the project, so if you put them all together, a solution would be more forthcoming than if we tried to do these projects independently."
Eric Toone, another SERCEB researcher and professor of chemistry and biochemistry at Duke, points to Haynes' excellent capability to organize and assemble such a large group of accomplished experts.
"It's all about Bart [Haynes]," said Toone. "When you dangle $45 million in front of a bunch of scientists, it makes them jump, but it's those who work the hardest and work the fastest and who take the ball and really run with it who win the project."
Although the sizable funds awarded to SERCEB are exciting, money will look much less alluring once it is distributed across all the participants in the projects, Johnston said.
"Forty-five million dollars is a lot of money, but if you divide that money by the number of investigators and institutions involved, it's not an outrageous sum," Johnston said. "The work is quite expensive and gets expensive pretty quickly once you include all the animals, materials and regulation approvals necessary for all the trials and experiments."
Rather than the money, Goldschmidt is most interested in potential for exciting research in science that can now be done.
"The era of the individual working alone in his lab is over--collaboration is the future," Goldschmidt said. "[The SERCEB] is like an orchestra that is substantially greater than its individual parts."
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