UNL research center hauls in $10.8M

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By MELISSA LEE / Lincoln Journal Star

You can clamp down on any fears you might have had about the future of one of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s hallmark research centers after it lost its founding director earlier this year.

The Redox Biology Center, UNL’s research vice chancellor likes to say, is actually a bit like NU’s volleyball team: When it loses one player, another steps up, and it wins a national championship anyway.

Looks like research on aging, cancer and other diseases could be headed that way. Vice Chancellor Prem Paul and other UNL leaders announced Monday the research center has received $10.8 million more from the National Institutes of Health for continued research on human health, a key grant to kick off the new academic year.

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It’s also a meaningful achievement for the research center, which lost its original director, Ruma Banerjee, one of UNL’s top scientists, to the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor earlier this year.

Banerjee’s departure never meant the end of redox biology at UNL, as the faculty affiliated with the research center have found significant collective success. Since the center was established at UNL in 2002, they’ve hauled in $27 million in grants.

But even Banerjee acknowledged in April the center could “temporarily destabilize” after she left.

It appears to have found its footing. A new director, biochemistry professor Vadim Gladyshev, has taken the reins, and the center has renewed funding and a confirmed status as one of the university’s premiere initiatives — and, campus leaders hope, one of the nation’s top sites for redox biologists.

“This is one of our best departments,” Paul said before a small crowd gathered at the Van Brunt Visitors Center for cookies and celebration.

The grant will fund the center through 2012 and will allow for the hiring of five new faculty. Sixteen faculty from UNL and the University of Nebraska Medical Center already contribute work.

Redox biology is housed in the Beadle Center. There, scientists study cell processes that could hold answers to treating some cancers, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, cardiovascular diseases and aging.

Among other areas, NU researchers have heavy interest in studying ways to treat — and prevent altogether — cancer, Gladyshev said.

They’re also looking for ways to slow down cell aging and extend human life, he said.

Let’s just say Paul will be pushing his researchers extra-hard in that area.

“I’m getting to the age where I need some help,” he joked.

Reach Melissa Lee at 473-2682 or mlee@journalstar.com.