The Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute presented five $30,000 seed grants to aid in joint research between Tech and Carilion Clinic researchers for several medical issues including cancer, obesity, technology, infectious disease and heart care.
Eric Earnhart, spokesman for Carilion Clinic, said that Carilion has participated in its own research for some time, but now it will work with Tech on collaborative research projects, in addition to the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine, which will welcome its first class in 2010.
"Carilion has been researching for some time, but now we have given grants out to Virginia Tech to help aid in their research," Earnhart said. "Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine is going to be completely different in the fact that it will be a cooperative effort between Tech and Carilion to work on research."
Carrie Boyd, administrative director of sponsored projects for Carilion, said that Carilion and Tech both have their strengths in different areas, so when the two entities combine, many opportunities will be formed from that relationship.
"Virginia Tech has its strengths in research, and Carilion has its strengths in patient care, so when we end up combining both of those strengths, we are going to have great opportunities arise for research," Boyd said.
Boyd said that the seed grant money is used mainly to fund support for graduate students participating in the research on campus, along with funding for some supplies.
"What Carilion has to offer is the patient care side of things," Boyd said. "Tech asks our physicians to pull information that they are able to use in their research."
"One of the projects, for example, is working on screening for cardiovascular risk in women that are pregnant," Earnhart said. "We are able to have our doctors and physicians work in collaboration with the researchers at Tech on the project. Tech has the means to do the research, and we have the doctors who are able to take that research and apply it to patients that they have right now."
Earnhart said that this joint opportunity would allow Tech's research results to be sent out to the doctors at Carilion as soon as they are found.
"Virginia Tech has the ability to compare and conduct the research, and we then have a way to quickly access that information," Earnhart said. "Tech is able to look at the research from Carilion and get the information out of it to solve medical problems. It is important that Carilion can provide the data, because Tech is then able to generate conclusions and results."
Carilion will work closely with Tech to ensure it provides all of the medical information necessary to aid in the research, Earnhart said.
"The Research Institute itself is a way for Virginia Tech to be involved in medical research," Earnhart said. "It would be difficult without the access to Carilion medical information because then Tech would not have a good basis for their research."
One project that the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute is funding through a seed grant focuses on ovarian cancer.
Eva Schmelz, a human nutrition, food, and exercise associate professor, is one of the primary researchers on this project.
"We are working on detecting ovarian cancer," Schmelz said. "We are also going to look at and examine the changes in gene expression in the cancerous tissue."
"Our plan is to establish a collaboration with the doctors and physicians at Carilion," Schmelz said. "They are going to, over the next few years, provide us with tissue that we can archive and examine over an extended period of time."
Schmelz said that her team will be examining cancerous tissue at the early and late stages, looking at the interaction of the disease over time.
"We will use the archived tissue for our research," Schmelz said. "With this tissue we hope to develop a type of tissue bank for future use in projects."
To apply for the seed grant, Schmelz said that her team wrote a grant proposal, hoping for the best.
"We wrote the proposal about a month ago," Schmelz said. "You can never be sure if you are going to receive the grant, but our chances were about 40 percent that we would get it, so that was encouraging."
Schmelz is required to use the initial seed money within the first year of her research project, but after that, she hopes to continue working on her research with Carilion Health.
"We will work on and finish our proposed project within the first year," Schmelz said. "We hope to continue to collect tissue samples over a long-term period. We want to develop this project for other researchers, too, so that they can use the information that we have found to aid them in their research as well, because it is really difficult for other researchers to try and obtain this type of cancerous tissue."
The funding period for the seed grant is 12 months, and it will run out after that, Boyd said.
"The way research works is that people ask questions, and then receive responses to those questions, which end up generating more questions," Boyd said. "Those questions end up snowballing into these big projects between Carilion and Virginia Tech."