A $24.5 million federal defense contract will allow researchers at two University of Nebraska campuses and the federal institute that binds them to work on developing drugs that could prevent or mitigate the effects of radiation on soldiers, first responders and others.
The contract from the Defense Health Agency continues for another five years, at a significantly higher funding level, an initiative launched in 2017 to develop measures that could counter the effects of exposure to high levels of radiation from a nuclear weapons attack, a nuclear accident or even a dirty bomb.
Researchers from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the University of Nebraska Medical Center now have several potential drug compounds they will continue to test, gathering data for potential evaluation by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
The contract comes through the U.S. Strategic Command to the University of Nebraska’s National Strategic Research Institute, which StratCom sponsors. NSRI is one of 15 University Affiliated Research Centers in the United States. The contract, the third from the Defense Health Agency, brings the project to more than $35 million in total funding. The new, approximately five-year contract also is the largest single-project award in NSRI’s 11-year history.
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Retired U.S. Air Force Maj. Gen. Rick Evans, NSRI executive director, said project partners are proud of the progress they have made so far.
“The goal is to get this as rapidly as possible through all those hurdles so we can have something that can (possibly) affect our warfighters or first responders or anybody else who needs access to this medication,” he said.
With instability in a number of places around the globe, including in places with nuclear capabilities, the need for such protections has been a topic of increased discussion recently, Evans said.
“We have to think about that problem even though society in general may want to avoid thinking about that if they possibly can,” he said.
A broader strategy behind the initiative has been the creation of a drug development pipeline for drugs of interest to the federal government that aren’t high on the list of priorities for drugmakers, said Ken Bayles, co-principal investigator and UNMC vice chancellor for research. Pharmaceutical companies typically focus on medications that will produce a return on their investment.
Bayles and David Berkowitz, a UNL chemistry professor and the other co-principal investigator, are collaborating under the contract. They are working with other researchers across the university system and with partners from major pharmaceutical companies across the U.S. who are university alumni. The researchers also partner with scientists at the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland.
That strategy, which the university proposed to the federal government, now is in full operation as the Nebraska Drug Discovery and Development Pipeline, or ND3P.
The group also is in an earlier stage of working toward countermeasures for chemical exposure under another federal contract, Bayles said.
“Our team is just really jazzed by this, because it’s science, but it’s also something that will benefit and help protect our nation, protect our soldiers,” he said. “I’m just so proud that here in Nebraska we’re the go-to source for this capability to help develop these really important drugs.”
Berkowitz, who also leads the chemistry division at the National Science Foundation, said the effort melds the talents in fundamental science at UNL with the skills in biomedical sciences at UNMC to create a “highly synergistic and powerful team.”
They also share facilities and technologies, such as UNL’s new 15-Tesla mass spectrometer, a device that allows researchers to identify substances by measuring their component masses and relative concentrations.
Another exciting element of the project is the opportunity to apply modern-day approaches to drug discovery. Those include new areas of science: metabolomics, proteomics and transcriptomics, which involve studying changes in the molecules and molecular processes that contribute to the form and functions of cells and of disease.
“It’s high-end science for a really noble goal, which is to protect people from radiation, military and also civilians,” Berkowitz said. “And we’re doing so in a way that brings Nebraskans together as scientists ... and the state will benefit greatly if we can forge more of these partnerships between these two campuses.”