UNC research teams awarded $170 million in grant funding

Last month, a research team from the Gillings School of Global Public Health was awarded $170 million by the National Institutes of Health to fund centers that will study precision nutrition.

Two Gillings professors are spearheading the work — Elizabeth Mayer-Davis will serve as the principal investigator for the Clinical Center and Susan Sumner will serve as the principal investigator for the Metabolomics and Clinical Assay Center.

“It's really important to me that we demonstrate the significance of the North Carolina Research Campus and I think that this grant award has really helped to do that," Sumner said.

The funding for the centers comes from two grants and will be used to establish a "common protocol" during the first year of the program. This protocol will provide direction and instruction for each clinical site and determine who is eligible to participate in the studies and receive testing such as metabotyping.

The goal of these centers is to increase the knowledge and information that individuals have about their health — specifically how certain environmental and chemical exposures can impact their metabolism.

“When we look at a person’s metabotype, we believe that we can inform the development of nutritional intervention strategies,” Sumner said.

The research will introduce a way to form a genetic profile of an individual that can be used to inform decisions about eating, exercise and medication intake.

“You and I could eat exactly the same food at the exact same time of day, but you might respond very differently than me,” Mayer-Davis said. “That has to do with differences in our genetic makeup and other aspects of biology.”

This research doesn't just stop at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Other schools in the state, including UNC-Charlotte, N.C. State University and the Duke University School of Medicine, will be involved.

"It was a different collection of people working together," Mayer-Davis said. "And I just was so grateful for everyone's participation and challenging each other scientifically, but collaborating and coming together in a pretty short amount of time to do this winning proposal."

Seeking an extremely competitive grant, the team worked together to formulate an application that demonstrated the impact these new centers could have. Mayer-Davis said it included organizing the data and logistics, as well as determining the number of people they needed to participate in the study.

“We pulled together people and worked to think through exactly the science that we wanted to propose and all of the logistics that we will need because we will be seeing and recruiting over 2,000 people just at our clinical site for the project,” she said.

Heidi Bleyer, a junior at Gillings, said she is excited by the opportunities these nutrition centers bring to the Research Triangle.

“It’s amazing to be part of such a big research community,” Bleyer said. “It’s cool to have people in this school that can be mentors and have such a vast bank of knowledge and experience."

Sumner and Mayer-Davis said this drive and interest in medicine within younger generations is exactly what they were hoping to achieve in the community.

The centers will provide high school and college students with opportunities to be involved in collaborative nutrition research, Sumner said.

Another goal of the centers was to provide more job opportunities for North Carolina residents.

Not only will this project provide more opportunities for high school and college students, but it will create an emergence of research across North Carolina.

“I'm excited about that because it'll just give lots of opportunities for lots of people, which really, at this stage in my career, that's what I want, is to help other people be successful," Mayer-Davis said.

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