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.
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.
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:
http://www.epa.gov/ncer/2005bioinformatics/.
To learn more about the EPA’s overall program in computational toxicology,
visit: http://www.epa.gov/comptox/.
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