Posted on August 5, 2004 at 9:35 a.m.
BIRMINGHAM, AL — The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) has been awarded $2.85 million over the next five years to establish one of six federal Skin Disease Research Centers. Existing centers are at Harvard, Yale, Vanderbilt, and Case Western Reserve universities and the University of Texas-Southwestern.
Dr. Craig A. Elmets, professor and chair of the UAB dermatology department, will direct the new center. “The funding from the National Institutes of Health will provide infrastructure and facilities and support services that will enable us to conduct innovative research projects on skin-related diseases, particularly immunological diseases of the skin and skin cancer,” Elmets said.
Laboratories for the center will be in new research space located in Volker Hall. Elmets said he plans to develop a tissue bank of normal and abnormal skin tissue that can be used by researchers. Another thrust of the work will be to identify novel proteins in the skin that may become abnormal in certain diseases.
“This grant will allow us to recruit additional researchers. Together with increased research space, this will give us the critical mass of resources to seek additional funding from federal and other sources,” said Elmets, who also is a senior scientist at the UAB Comprehensive Cancer Center.
Alabama has large numbers of residents with immunological-based skin diseases who might benefit from the center, he said. These diseases include eczema, psoriasis and hives. Researchers in the center also will study autoimmune diseases that have significant skin manifestations, such as lupus, scleroderma and the blistering diseases such as pemphigus. “We will aim at identifying new methods of prevention and treatment of these diseases,” Elmets said.
Skin cancers are more prevalent in Alabama than many other states. “A major cause of skin cancer is sunlight, and our residents spend a lot of time outdoors exposed to the sun, whether for work or for play,” he said. “In our largely rural setting, this predisposes us to non-melanoma skin cancers and to malignant melanomas.”