Illinois Medicine

RAMASWAMY WORKING TO DEVELOP FILIRIASIS VACCINE South America and Southeast Asia, up to and including elephantiasis. Ramas- T wamy Kalya- nasundaram, PhD, professor and head of the department of biomedical sciences at the College of Medicine in Rock- ford, has led the development of a vaccine for filiriasis that's received National Institutes of Health funding, and it is on track for FDA approval, he says. "Nobody has made a vaccine for this yet," Ramaswamy says. "We are hoping to initiate phase 1 clinical trials next year in the U.S. and India," he says. Ramaswamy has found the vaccine to hold promise in treating two related conditions that both cause blindness, onchocerca and loa loa. The latter, which is common in West Africa, has led to entire villages being blinded, Ramaswamy says. "That's why NIH is so enthusiastic about this project," he says. HOUGH RARE IN THE DEVELOPED WORLD, filiriasis causes sometimes spectacular horrors for people in Africa, Breathe Easier $12M From NIH to Study Acute Lung Injury R Ramaswamy Kalyanasundaram PHOTO: ROBERTA DUPUIS-DEVLIN ESEARCHERS AT THE COLLEGE OF MEDICINE have received more than $11.7 million to study the pathology of severe lung injury as part of a multi- pronged investigation funded by the Na- tional Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, one of the National Institutes of Health. Acute lung injury and its even more severe form, acute respiratory distress syn- drome, result from pulmonary edema and inflamma- tion. Fatal almost 40 percent of the time, this condition results from either direct lung injury from infection, or indirect injury from trauma, sepsis, pancreatitis, trans- fusions, radiation or drug overdose. The NIH grant funds an interdisciplinary investiga- tion of the bio-active lipid sphingosine-1-phosphate, or S1P, which is delving into its receptors and their role in lung cell signaling, inflammation and injury due to sepsis or radiation. Viswanathan Natarajan, PhD, program director and professor of pharmacology and medicine and co-director of the college's Institute for Personalized Respiratory Medicine, is leading a project that will use animal and cell-culture models to examine how S1P is generated inside cells and how it has a protective effect in ALI. A second project that will investigate the role of S1P receptors in ALI is headed by Joe G.N. "Skip" Garcia, MD, University of Illinois vice president for health affairs and Earl M. Bane Professor of Medicine, who co-directs the Institute for Personalized Respiratory Medicine with Natarajan. Steve Dudek, MD, associate professor in pulmonary, critical care and sleep medicine, will lead a third project. He'll be working with researchers at the City University of New York to develop analogues of S1P and another molecule to boost their therapeutic potential toward the ultimate goal of drug development. The final project will investigate ALI using the radia- tion-induced lung injury animal model. This will be led by Jeffrey Jacobson, MD, associate professor in pulmonary, critical care and sleep medicine, and Ralph Weichselbaum, MD, chief of services in radiation oncology at the College of Medicine and chairman of radiation and cellular oncology at the University of Chicago. Natarajan said the college's research team "wants to quickly move from bench to bedside, finding ways to minimize the lung injury and propel the patients on a path of rapid recovery." Viswanathan Natarajan ILLINOIS MEDICINE | 7

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