UB, Niagara University, Heart Center of Niagara Collaboration Makes Progress in Project Aimed at Tackling Heart Disease in WNY
June 26, 2009
A collaboration involving physicians, researchers, graduate students and undergraduate students from three prominent regional institutions is intent on improving heart health in Western New York, an area with a heart disease death rate that is twice the national average.
The collaboration, which took shape in 2005, involves the University at Buffalo, Niagara Falls Memorial Medical Center and Niagara University (NU) ,and converges at The Heart Center of Niagara (HCON), part of Niagara Falls Memorial Medical Center in Niagara County, where rates of cardiovascular disease and mortality from the disease are the greatest in the five-county region.
As their first goal, the parties in this venture established a joint research program to evaluate non-invasive cardiac imaging methods for identifying, tracking and stratifying risk of coronary artery disease (CAD) in the population.
The collaboration has built upon initial investments by Niagara Falls Memorial Medical Center, UB and NU to yield new funding. New grants include $43,500 awarded to Brent Williams, an epidemiology doctoral student in the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine in UB's School of Public Health and Health Professions, to develop the powerful PET patient database that will facilitate much of the research collaboration's endeavors. The grants to Williams were awarded by the American Heart Association's Founders' Affiliate Predoctoral Fellowship program and the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine's Saxon Graham Research Award program.
The partners in this collaboration have been organized to make the most of their natural strengths through the graduate programs at UB, including UB's School of Public Health and Health Professions and New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences. These partners will collaborate with the undergraduate Academic Center for Integrated Science at Niagara University's Biology and Chemistry Department, where students located close to Niagara Falls Memorial Medical Center can participate onsite in research efforts at the HCON. Furthermore, NU students are able to utilize NU's expanding laboratory facilities.
