$6.4 million to the Lung Repair and Regeneration Consortium at Duke University

The DCRI’s Scott Palmer to oversee the Lung Repair and Regeneration Consortium

—The Duke Clinical Research Institute (DCRI) and the Duke Translational Research Institute (DTRI) were recently awarded a five-year, $6.4 million grant to develop and support the Lung Repair and Regeneration Consortium (LRRC). Scott Palmer, MD, MHS, director of the DCRI’s Pulmonary Research program is leading the project with support from DTRI Chief Operating Officer Victoria Christian.

The DCRI and DTRI will serve together as the administrative coordinating center, working closely with six research centers that make up the consortium. Awarded under separate grants, the research centers are located across the United States, including a center headed by Drs. Brigid Hogan and Barry Stripp from Duke and Dr. Scott Randell from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) created the LRRC to address the growing burden of lung disease and its importance in public health. According to the National Institutes of Health, respiratory disease is now the third leading cause of death in the United States, and for many lung conditions there are no effective treatments. Researchers in the consortium will focus on developing new regenerative and restorative therapies to reverse the debilitating effects of severe lung conditions such as emphysema, cystic fibrosis, and pulmonary fibrosis.
The consortium includes experts in numerous fields, including:

• Developmental biology
• Stem cell biology
• Pulmonary medicine
• Lung injury
• Genomics
• Nanotechnology
• Bioengineering

In addition to developing new therapies for lung repair and regeneration, the LRRC will also create a skills development core to train new researchers on the latest in pulmonary medicine. The DCRI/DTRI team will create a successful infrastructure to foster these multicenter, multi-disciplinary collaborations in support of the NHLBI’s mission to improve lung health through regeneration and repair research.
The consortium website will be available sometime in 2012.
 Please e-mail lrrc@duke.edu for more information.