PHILADELPHIA – The National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has renewed its funding to the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine’s Center of Excellence in Environmental Toxicology (CEET).
The new grant totals over $8.3 million and extends CEET’s mandate through March 2015. CEET was established in 2004 with a four-year, $4.1 million grant from NIEHS to study the effects of environmental pollutants on human health.
CEET (www.med.upenn.edu/ceet) represents a partnership between research scientists and communities in southeastern Pennsylvania to improve environmental health and medicine in the region. Its mission is to understand the mechanism by which environmental exposures lead to disease. Understanding these processes can lead to early diagnosis, intervention, and prevention strategies. The Penn CEET is one of only 17 designated Environmental Health Science Core Centers in the United States and the first in Pennsylvania.
“CEET is now fully funded to extend studies on how environmental agents, including cigarette smoke, ozone, endocrine disrupting chemicals, and carcinogens cause disease, and to translate these findings to improve environmental health. Its goal is to accomplish this through personalized approaches including the predictive power of genotyping and biomarkers of exposure and response,” says CEET director Trevor Penning, PhD, Professor of Pharmacology, Biochemistry & Biophysics and OB/GYN.
In the initial four years of funding the CEET has made several major accomplishments towards its mission:
- Identified a panel of biomarkers that can determine individual exposure and adverse response to cigarette smoke.
- Identified novel lipid mediators of ozone-exacerbated asthma.
- Shown that carcinogens present in tobacco smoke cause oxidative damage of DNA, leading to mutation of tumor-suppressor genes.
- Initiated a multi-site consortium to study gene-environment interactions in lung cancer.
- Identified individual genetic variation responsible for low-folate, high- homocysteine levels that has been linked to neural tube defects such as spina bifida.
- Won the prestigious Annual Community-Campus Partnerships for Health Award for its Community-Based Participatory research on exposure to the endocrine-disrupting chemical perfluoroctanoate, which led to the replacement of contaminated water in the Little-Hocking Water district in Ohio.
- Established the TREES (Teen Research in and Education in Environmental Science) program for high school student interns.
Penn Medicine is one of the world’s leading academic medical centers, dedicated to the related missions of medical education, biomedical research, excellence in patient care, and community service. The organization consists of the University of Pennsylvania Health System and Penn’s Raymond and Ruth Perelman School of Medicine, founded in 1765 as the nation’s first medical school.
The Perelman School of Medicine is consistently among the nation's top recipients of funding from the National Institutes of Health, with $550 million awarded in the 2022 fiscal year. Home to a proud history of “firsts” in medicine, Penn Medicine teams have pioneered discoveries and innovations that have shaped modern medicine, including recent breakthroughs such as CAR T cell therapy for cancer and the mRNA technology used in COVID-19 vaccines.
The University of Pennsylvania Health System’s patient care facilities stretch from the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania to the New Jersey shore. These include the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, Chester County Hospital, Lancaster General Health, Penn Medicine Princeton Health, and Pennsylvania Hospital—the nation’s first hospital, founded in 1751. Additional facilities and enterprises include Good Shepherd Penn Partners, Penn Medicine at Home, Lancaster Behavioral Health Hospital, and Princeton House Behavioral Health, among others.
Penn Medicine is an $11.1 billion enterprise powered by more than 49,000 talented faculty and staff.