LINCOLN - Dr. Howard Gendelman has received a prestigious national grant award that will help his University of Nebraska Medical Center research team continue developing rapid-autopsy techniques for brain-disease treatment.
The $3 million Javits Neuroscience Investigator Award is the second major award Gendelman has received in a year. Last March, Gendelman was named a Fulbright Scholar and studied nerve regeneration for eight months at the world-renowned Weizmann Institute in Israel.
Javits winners make up a rather exclusive club. One of last year's Nobel Laureates in medicine, Paul Greengard, received the award in 1985.
Gendelman's research center is one of just a handful in the world pursuing rapid autopsies as an alternative source of brain tissue for research into Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and AIDS-related dementia. UNMC launched a search for alternatives after controversy erupted 16 months ago over Gendelman's use of aborted fetal tissue in his brain-disease research. Anti-abortion activists who think the research encourages abortions have lobbied the Nebraska Legislature to ban the use of aborted fetal tissue. A ban proposal failed last year, but a similar one is pending this year.
Gendelman said the Javits Award represented crucial national recognition and validation of his rapid-autopsy efforts, which he began a relatively short time ago in February 2000. When he was under consideration for the award last year, he said, the program he'd built from scratch was in its infancy.
"If I don't get the money at the national level, this research ends," he said.
Rapid autopsies performed within an hour of brain donors' deaths have yielded two of the three types of brain cells required in Gendelman's research. Gendelman and just a few other scientists have managed to derive viable astrocytes and microglia, two types of brain-support cells, from rapid autopsies. But the brain's all-important "thinking" cells, the neurons, have so far eluded everyone. Gendelman returned to Nebraska this week from Arizona, where he and his research team studied rapid-autopsy techniques at the science center that pioneered them, the Sun Health Research Institute.
A national committee of scientists reviewed Gendelman's entire body of work, rapid-autopsy efforts included, and decided to fund it for an unusually long length of time -- seven years. Grants other than the Javits Award normally don't run longer than five years.
"It puts a stamp of approval that we trust the quality of his research enough that we believe he will continue to be productive over the next seven years," said Al Kerza-Kwiatecki, program director for infectious diseases of the nervous system at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, a division of the National Institutes of Health. His institute administers the awards.
Kerza-Kwiatecki continued: "That's quite a benefit to give a scientist this kind of vote of confidence, as it's very time-consuming to make scientists submit new documentation every couple years so their progress can be monitored."
UNMC Chancellor Dr. Harold Maurer congratulated Gendelman and his research team. "I think the Javits Award sends a strong message that UNMC is making impressive strides in its research efforts on neurodegenerative disorders," Maurer said. "It is among the best in the nation, and we are very proud of this accomplishment. The fact that a large portion of the proposed work will come from alternative sources other than fetal cells demonstrates the commitment and progress made by our scientists."
The $3 million Javits Award doesn't end the financial challenges facing UNMC's practically brand-new rapid-autopsy program. The Javits grant fund scientific experiments on the brain tissue obtained from rapid autopsies, but does nothing to help in the extremely expensive and time-consuming process of conducting the rapid autopsies. The logistics are challenging; because brain donors don't always die during business hours, a large team of doctors, nurses, technicians and scientists must be kept on call 24 hours a day to collect brain tissue on a moment's notice. (For more on the challenges involved, see StatePaper's article "Rapid Autopsies the Tool in Arizona, Nebraska Quest for Neurons.")
UNMC has already spent $400,000 on developing the program, but more money is needed to fund the ongoing logistical needs. Gendelman said he's applying for other national grants to that end, and other fundraising efforts are still under discussion.
In 1983, Congress created the Senator Jacob Javits Awards in the Neurosciences. They were established to honor the late Sen. Jacob Javits of New York, who suffered from Lou Gehrig's disease. Awardees must have demonstrated exceptional scientific excellence and productivity in one of the areas of neurological research supported by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, have proposals of the highest scientific merit, and be judged highly likely to be able to continue to do research on the cutting edge of their science for the next seven years.
Gendelman said everyone at his research center, and people like the UNMC chancellor and University of Nebraska president who supported it, deserved credit for the Javits achievement. "Any award of this nature is never a single person. I would love to take credit for everything I do. But the truth is this is an award for our entire team, this research center.
"It's the team, again not me, who's turned the adversity into triumph. I couldn't be more proud of the people who have worked with me."
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This story originally appeared in Nebraska StatePaper on March 10, 2001.
Saturday, March 10, 2001
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