Stimulus funds aid MCG research

Federal stimulus funding is providing infrastructure and growth of a different kind at Medical College of Georgia.

Researchers are getting about $8 million from funds provided by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, part of $5 billion that went to the National Institutes of Health as part of that package. The money is providing everything from new computer servers to research into how the immune system works.

Andrew Mellor, the director of the Immunotherapy Center and Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar Chair in Immunogenetics at MCG, got $367,500 to further his research in how a certain chemical might be thwarting the effects of vaccines.

Called indoleamine 2,3-dioxygenase, or IDO, it has been shown to be one way a fetus is protected from the mother's immune system and might be exploited by cancer and by HIV to evade the body's immune system. In this case, it might be one way that some vaccines are prevented from creating a protective immune response, Dr. Mellor said, in what they are calling a "counter-regulatory" response.

"There are 'failed vaccines' in a number of key areas, and HIV is one of them of course," he said. "The question now is, with the new knowledge that hosts respond with counter-regulatory responses in some cases, or at least that's the hypothesis, should we now go back and look at some of those failed vaccines and see if by inhibiting the regulatory process that we get a better, more effective response to the vaccines."

The stimulus funding is allowing NIH to fund grants that are high quality but fell short before because of shrinking funding levels, Dr. Mellor said.

"(The grant) achieved a score that was very good or excellent but it was not in the funding range, which was getting tighter and tighter," he said.

The $1.8 million coming to Richard McIndoe will add to his computer infrastructure, allowing him to replace servers used in bioinformatics that are 6 or 7 years old. Dr. McIndoe, the associate director of the Center for Biotechnology and Genomic Medicine at MCG, runs a coordinating bioinformatics unit that helps two consortiums through the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. Part of his grant will pay for his work on an effort by the institute to bring together disparate data collections and ensure researchers have easier access to it.

Reach Tom Corwin at (706) 823-3213 or tom.corwin@augustachronicle.com.