Heads up on UCI’s $24.3-million grant

UC Irvine has received a $24.3-million grant to create and enhance technology for studying the human brain, the second-largest grant the campus has received.

Last June, UCI netted a record $40 million from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to create a bioterrorism research center on campus. The current grant, obtained through the National Institutes of Health, is good for five years.

With the funding, UCI will expand its Brain Imaging Center on campus both to research new technology for detecting schizophrenia and other mental disorders, and also to create methods of translating and combining data from different media. Steven Potkin, the director of the center and professor of psychiatry and human behavior, is spearheading the project.

“It was terrific to get this,” Potkin said of the grant. “It’s harder and harder to get grants these days, so this made it particularly sweet. This is a project that I feel really great about, so we’re delighted to be able to move ahead with it.”

In 2001, UCI was one of many sites across the country that joined the Biomedical Informatics Research Network, a National Institutes of Health initiative that sought to improve technology for the treatment of brain diseases. The network has four principal sites at UCI, UCLA, UC San Diego and Harvard University, with the UCI center devoted to studying brain functions during schizophrenia, depression, Parkinson’s disease and other conditions.

Joining UCI in its research are 13 other institutes, including Yale University, UCLA, Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham & Women’s Hospital and the University of Iowa. Jessica Turner, the UCI project manager, said one major benefit of the grant would be to match rare cases of schizophrenia in patients from around the country.

“What we’re going to be able to do with this is really move the field ahead to the point where multisite imaging studies will become the norm rather than the exception,” she said.

Potkin, who has overseen UCI’s part of the network for the last five years, received news of the grant at the beginning of March. The main thrust of the new project, he said, was to create uniform technology so that different laboratories, using different equipment, could share their findings.

Such a precise approach was necessary to study a disease like schizophrenia, Potkin explained.

“It’s a lifelong illness that really robs people of the promise they would have for fulfilling a useful life,” he said. “It’s a tragic illness, but a very subtle illness that involves the essence of human thought. So it’s a good thing to tackle. It’s an appropriate challenge.”dpt.14-uci2-BPhotoInfoNH1OTOVM20060314iw3nftkn(LA)Steven Potkin