VCU School of Medicine Receives NIH Grant

By Chris Davis
October 27, 2009

RICHMOND, Va. -- Through these difficult economic times, cutbacks and layoffs have become a part of everyday life. But the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, signed into law in February of 2009 by President Obama, created a rare funding opportunity for many organizations and schools, including the VCU School of Medicine.

The School of Medicine accepted a grant of $1 million from the National Institutes of Health on Sep. 23, 2009. The grant, named “Community Partnership for Ethical Research,” will fund a program to determine the overall effectiveness of research and general health care in the Richmond community. 

Through their research, a four-member team from the School of Medicine, led by Dr. Betsy Ripley, Professor of Medicine and senior chair of the Institutional Review Board at VCU, plans to map a more effective strategy for future research and clinical care in the Richmond area.

Ripley wants “to increase knowledge about research in the city,” citing the establishment of Community Advocates for Research (CARs), Richmond inhabitants who essentially serve as liaisons between the researchers and the rest of the community.

Not only does Ripley’s team “want the city to be full of CARs,” but they plan to recruit up to 12 community members to serve on the team with them.

The grant will not only pay for travel, equipment, and overhead paid to the university, it has also created three new jobs and will pay the salaries of the principal investigators in the study.

Additionally, the funds will allow Ripley’s team to pay the CARs in the study.

“Their skills and their time are just as important as ours,” added Ripley.

With the CARs, the team is trying to map hot spots for seizures in the city.

 “Our goal is to map where all the seizures occur, and then map where all our contacts (CARs) are to see if we can truly cover the city,” said Ripley. In doing so, the city’s health system can become more responsive to the needs of its patients. 

Ripley’s study is partly based on RAMPART (Rapid Anticonvulsant Medication Prior to ARrival Trial), a program being tested by many medical centers around the nation.

According to the Emory University School of Medicine’s Web site, RAMPART is working to determine the most effective way to stop prolonged seizures, or status epilipticus, whether with an IV or an intramuscular injection.

Ripley’s program, one of only about 200 proposals to receive funding, focuses more on the community, dealing with aspects of ethics and creating a network of information that can be disseminated easily throughout the population.

“Ethics is becoming a much bigger part of what the NIH is looking for,” said Ripley. And as for getting the information to the network, Ripley wants to “train the community advocates about research. Then they can take it out into their networks.”

However, she said, these networks can’t continue to grow without future funding.

VCU’s grant was just a small portion of the NIH’s allotment through the Recovery Act; with the $200 million they received from the act, the NIH established a series of Challenge Grants in a wide range of categories.

According to the NIH’s Web site, the 23-month grants are designated “Challenge Grants” because they address specific scientific research challenges, such as “specific knowledge gaps, scientific opportunities, new technologies, data generation, or research methods that would benefit from an influx of funds to quickly advance the area in significant ways.”