Oct 22, 2002

Dartmouth, Arizona Awarded Funding to Collaborate

Dartmouth and the University of Arizona have independently established strong interdisciplinary research programs funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) to study the health effects of arsenic in drinking water. Now NIEHS has awarded a $150,000 supplement to assist them in establishing a formal collaboration between their programs. Dartmouth’s interdisciplinary research project, "Toxic Metals in the Northeast: From Biological to Environmental Implications" and the University of Arizona's "Hazardous Waste Risk and Remediation in the Southwest" are funded through the NIEHS Superfund Basic Research Program. The new supplement will allow them to more formally develop collaborative projects, share data and methodologies, and develop cooperative pilot projects.

Both research programs were developed as a result of a growing awareness that their regions — as well as many other regions of the country — have significant levels of arsenic contamination in their groundwater. Exposure to arsenic in drinking water has been linked to increased risk of various illnesses including diabetes, heart disease, birth defects and several different forms of cancer. Each research program has projects that are exploring this question both at the population level through epidemiology studies, and at the mechanistic level through studies of cell signaling, genomic, and proteomic level responses to arsenic in model systems. In addition to their focus on low-dose, chronic arsenic effects relevant to human exposures, both research groups are interested in bridging the gap between the mechanistic and population studies through the development of biomarkers of exposure, effect or susceptibility that can be applied to the human studies in the field.

The Superfund Basic Research Program was created within the Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act (SARA) of 1986 which established a university-based program of basic research within the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), a division of the National Institutes of Health. The program uses money from the Superfund Trust, and complements the activities of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Nancy Serrell
Center for Environmental Health Sciences at Dartmouth