UAB to Head Deep South Cancer Network

The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) has received a five-year federal grant to establish a community infrastructure in an effort to help reduce the disparity in cancer mortality rates of blacks and whites. Blacks are at a higher risk of dying from breast, prostate, colon and some other cancers.

April 6, 2000

BIRMINGHAM, AL — The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) has received a five-year federal grant to establish a community infrastructure in an effort to help reduce the disparity in cancer mortality rates of blacks and whites. Blacks are at a higher risk of dying from breast, prostate, colon and some other cancers.

The UAB Comprehensive Cancer Center is one of 17 institutions nationwide to participate in a new $60 million National Cancer Institute (NCI) program to create or implement cancer control, prevention, research, and training programs in minority and underserved populations. The UAB grant, expected to be approximately $1 million per year, will directly target African-Americans. Specific dollar amounts for the individual grants were not announced.

UAB’s network will include the University of Southern Mississippi in what will be called the Deep South Network for Cancer Control. The network will target two poor rural areas, including Alabama’s Black Belt counties and the Delta of Mississippi. Alabama's Jefferson County and the cities of Hattiesburg and Laurel in Mississippi are also included.

Dr. Edward Partridge of UAB, principal investigator for the Deep South Network, said, “The grant will be used to structure a community effort which will be of use in a continuing number of future research projects.”

Partridge is the cancer center’s associate director for prevention and control research. He and other UAB researchers have developed projects in 13 Alabama counties in recent years, but each time were required to build the community effort from scratch. “This is an absolutely brilliant idea by the NCI, to provide funds to build a stable infrastructure for many future research projects,” he said. “This grant and other projects we have will position us to best work with African-Americans to solve the racial mortality gap problem.”

The Deep South Network will recruit and train between 600-700 lay people in the two states to serve as community health advisors (CHAs) and further train them as research partners. The cooperative relationships will help foster cancer awareness activities, support minority enrollment in clinical trials, and promote the development of minority junior biomedical researchers.

UAB’s previous success in developing the CHA concept and in other work with minority populations in the South prompted the federal government to include it in this grant, Partridge said. “The promotion of cancer control in the black and underserved community of Alabama has been part of our mission since 1992,” he said.

Heading the Mississippi arm of the network is Dr. Agnes Hinton of USM. UAB co-investigators are Drs. Mona Fouad, Connie Kohler, Mark Dignan, Lee Green, and Roma Williams.