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NDRI Awarded $7.6 Million Grant From NIH For the Next Five Years to Fund Core Initiatives

Posted on: Tuesday, 4 November 2008, 12:00 CST

NDRI, the National Disease Research Interchange, announced that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded a $7.6 million grant to NDRI to enable the human tissue science organization to expand its core mission to collect, process, and distribute donated human tissue to hundreds of leading research facilities throughout the US, for the next five years. Since 1980, NDRI has served a vital need providing some 5,000 scientists with more than 300,000 human biomaterials, leading to more than 2,500 papers published in scholarly journals on diseases from diabetes to cancer to HIV and rare diseases. Today NDRI is the leading national organization that connects donated human tissue with the research scientists who need it to develop new therapies and cures for human diseases. NDRI serves almost every disease imaginable.

"We are very excited about the $7.6 million funding from the NIH to NDRI. This award is especially noteworthy in the face of NIH budget crunches. The funding acknowledges the high esteem the NIH and their reviewers have for the outstanding efforts of NDRI. This funding will help sustain and enhance NDRI's efforts to provide the many investigators who depend on tissue/cell samples from us with the highest quality and quantity of material," said Hal E. Broxmeyer, Chairman of the Board of Directors, NDRI, Distinguished Professor, Chairman & Mary Margaret Walther Professor of Microbiology/Immunology, Indiana University School of Medicine.

After a rigorous peer review, the grant was awarded through five NIH institutes, a "Multi-Institute Initiative" including NIDDK, the National Institute of Diabetes, Digestive and Kidney Diseases, NEI, the National Eye Institute, NIAMS, the National Institute of Arthritis, Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases, NIAID, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and NHLBI, the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. The core grant is from NCRR, the National Center for Research Resources. This NIH grant is especially important in this era of medical research budget cuts and reductions in funding.

Some 20,000 tissues pass through NDRI each year to about 500 scientists, at about 250 of the finest university-based research centers. The role that NDRI plays in science today has grown tremendously with the number of tissues, derivatives and initiatives they provide, including their "Stem Cell Initiative", providing vital stem cell material from discarded birth tissues. NDRI is able to provide thousands of cancer tumor samples each year helping support some of the most important cancer studies in the country. NDRI has special projects in type 1 and type 2 diabetes and supports eye disease research in retinopathy, glaucoma, macular degeneration, retinitis pigmentosa, and other eye diseases. NDRI administers a large collection of uniquely valuable families within a genetics registry. This program provides DNA, cell lines and medical history data to scientists for the genetics of thyroid disease, type 1 diabetes and autoimmune diseases.

"The way to study human disease is to study human tissue," states Lee Ducat, founder and president of NDRI and founder of JDRF (the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation). "Before NDRI existed, scientists could not get human tissue easily or in any continuous way for their studies. In those days, most human tissue was trashed or incinerated. NDRI has created a new paradigm turning human tissue donated into a national treasure. We designed all of the original systems that provide human tissue to scientists with the help of funding from PEW Memorial Trust. The growth of NDRI means to researchers that they can access just about any tissue of the human body needed for their studies. This NIH grant of $7.6 million makes it possible for NDRI to continue this critically important role in the medical discovery process. NDRI's service has become literally indispensable to scientific discovery."

Ducat founded NDRI in 1980 to provide scientists with pancreatic tissue for diabetes research and islet cell transplant. At that time, no national organization provided human biomaterials for research purposes. Since then, NDRI has become renowned globally for its indispensable role as the lead organization which matches scientists to human cells, tissues and organs for their research projects. NDRI is the only organization which provides tissue from HIV-positive donors to scientific studies to investigate the various aspects of AIDS, and how it manifests in the body. Funding from this NIH grant will support studies which track the HIV virus in the body to find where HIV hides in the systems of asymptomatic patients. This NDRI initiative procures tissues from symptomatic donors to better understand the prognosis of this deadly virus. More than three million deaths occur annually as a result of HIV, a rate that researchers are calling epidemic proportions.

About NDRI

NDRI (the National Disease Research Interchange) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, established in 1980 by Lee Ducat, also the founder of JDRF (the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation), to provide scientists access to human cells, tissues and organs which would have been thrown away and are now saved for critical research projects. In the past 20 years, NDRI has served some 5,000 scientists with more than 300,000 human biomaterials, leading to more than 2,500 papers published in scholarly journals on diseases from diabetes to cancer to HIV and rare diseases.

Funded in part by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), NDRI provides biomaterials to more than 200 of the nation's most prominent academic-based research centers including the Harvard Medical School, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, Stanford University, and Thomas Jefferson University, among others. NDRI also provides tissues to government agencies and grantees including the NIH, the U.S. Food & Drug Administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, The Centers for Disease Control, and to some of the nation's top Pharma, Biotech R&D programs. For more information as to how to become a "Tissue for Research Donor", please call 877-221-NDRI (6914) or visit www.ndriresource.org.

For specific examples how NDRI is utilizing the NIH grant, contact Kristen Insalaco or Vince Powers, 215-568-2525.

Source: Business Wire

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