The National Institutes of Health
(NIH) has awarded a five-year, $19.2 million grant for Rutgers and the University of Medicine
and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ)-Robert
Wood Johnson
Medical School
to support a new research center focused on the development of medical
countermeasures against chemical threats.
The center will include faculty from UMDNJ-Robert
Wood Johnson
Medical School
and the Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy at Rutgers, as well as Lehigh University
in Bethlehem, Pa.
The center will concentrate on
developing drugs to treat those exposed to sulfur mustard, which causes burning
and blistering of the skin, eyes and lungs. The chemical warfare agent – used
as far back as World War I, and more recently in the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s
– is easy to make and transport, and therefore thought to present a likely
terror threat.
"We will develop drugs that can be used against actual chemicals that could be used in a terror attack," said Jeffrey Laskin, of UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson, who will direct the new center. Laskin said there were already promising leads with which to work. "We are quite hopeful that drugs will be available in the foreseeable future."
The principal investigators include Laskin; Donald Gerecke at Rutgers, co-director of the center; Marion Gordon, Joshua Gray, Diane Heck, Debra Laskin, and Patrick Sinko, also at Rutgers, and Ned Heindel at Lehigh University. Investigators at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and Rutgers are members of the Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute.
- Patricia M. Hansen and Ken Branson