OKLAHOMA CITY, October 30, 2006—The National Institutes of Health has awarded the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation an $8.4 million grant to study processes that lead to heart disease, cancer and other illnesses. The five-year award came from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute at the NIH.

The grant will focus on the role of complex sugar chains in a variety of biological processes. According to Rodger McEver, M.D., the principal investigator on the grant and vice president of research at OMRF, these chains play a vital part in defending the body against pathogens.

“In the blood stream, white blood cells—the body’s infection fighters—use sugar chains to anchor to proteins that line the walls of blood vessels,” said McEver. “Once they are anchored at the site of an infection, the white blood cells can penetrate the tissue and fight infection.”

Researchers are only beginning to understand the mechanisms that drive this process. Such knowledge, said McEver, could be crucial to understanding numerous diseases.

“When this process goes awry, it can damage tissues and impede blood flow,” he said. “That can lead to heart attacks and strokes. It may also play a role in organ rejection in transplant patients, asthma, psoriasis and sickle cell anemia.

“If we can better understand how the body normally recruits white blood cells to fight infection, it will give us a window into how this process can go wrong,” continued McEver. “And, hopefully, over the long-term, new insights could lead to the development of therapeutics to help curb heart disease and other ailments.”

A second project on the grant, led by Lijun Xia, M.D., will look at how complex sugar chains can affect the development of blood vessels. “Learning how these blood vessels develop could provide important insights for inhibiting cancer,” said McEver. “It could also provide information that could be useful in combating heart attacks and vision loss due to diabetes.”

The final project on the grant will examine how interactions between sugar and protein chains help end immune responses once the body has successfully staved off an infection. Richard Cummings, Ph.D., will lead that study.

“Most people have never heard of sugar chains, but they play an important role both in causing and fighting illness,” said McEver. “The more we learn about these structures and how they work, the better equipped we will be to treat human disease.”

About OMRF:
Celebrating its 60th birthday in 2006, OMRF (www.omrf.org) is a nonprofit biomedical research institute dedicated to understanding and curing human disease. Its scientists focus on such critical research areas as Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, lupus and cardiovascular disease. It is home to Oklahoma’s only member of the National Academy of Sciences.