October 4, 2010: This Week in SC News and Research

Hello everyone,

Sickle Cell Warriors in Tennessee  ~ great news! A Vanderbilt-Meharry Center for Excellence in Sickle Cell Disease has been established by Vanderbilt University Medical Center and Meharry Medical College.  This means that we now have 11 centers for sickle cell disease. Hopefully this means that more qualitative research can be done on people with sickle cell. Michael DeBaun, M.D., MPH, an internationally renowned researcher in the area of SCD, has been named director of the new Center for Excellence. When DeBaun arrives in November, he will bring with him the clinical coordinating center for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Silent Cerebral Infarct Transfusion Trial. Read the full article HERE.

In Georgia, a researcher from the biomedical engineering department operated by Georgia Tech and Emory University has received a $1.5 million NIH Director’s New Innovator Award to support a project aimed at reducing the incidence of stroke in children with sickle cell disease. Manu Platt, an assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, will use the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding to develop models for identifying which children with the disease are at risk for stroke. For those more scientifically based, read the whole press release HERE. It goes into detail of how the modeling and research study will be attempted.

It’s great that NIH is spending more money on sickle cell research. Kudos to them and the researchers that are fighting for us.

In other news, Glymometics Inc. just published pre-clinical data of it’s new drug GMI-1070 which reverses vaso-occlusion in mice. GMI-1070 is currently is Phase 2 clinical testing in patients experiencing vaso-occlusive crisis. Read more HERE: