PHILADELPHIA – The University of Pennsylvania Prevention Research Center (PRC) has received $1.4 million from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for three new Special Interest Projects (SIPs).
In addition to its core funding to start the Center, the UPenn PRC has received a total of seven supplements in funding during its first two years, totaling $5.4 million.
“We are thrilled to be expanding the breadth of projects that have been funded through the UPenn PRC, and delighted to bring additional investigators into the PRC family,” said Karen Glanz, PhD, MPH, the George A. Weiss University professor of Epidemiology and Nursing and PIK professor, who directs the UPenn PRC with Kevin Volpp, MD, PhD, who is also director of the Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics.
One of the projects funded by the CDC (SIP #15-006) is a two-year initiative that aims to build local community health leadership to prevent chronic disease.
“The Philadelphia Health Leadership Institute (PHLI) will create a network of colleagues in a West Philadelphia Promise Zone who can design, implement and evaluate programs for health promotion and disease prevention that are grounded in local needs, interests and resources,” said Principal Investigator Frances Barg, PhD, a medical anthropologist and an associate professor in the department of Family Medicine and Community Health.
The other investigators are Heather Klusaritz, PhD, MSW, Peter Cronholm, MD, MSCE, Chyke Doubeni, MD, MPH, and Karen Glanz, PhD, MPH.
Another is a three-year funded project (SIP #15-001) led by Christine Hill-Kayser, MD, an assistant professor of Radiation Oncology, and Lisa Schwartz, PhD, an assistant professor of clinical psychology in Pediatrics at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, that tests the impact of a technology-based intervention that will provide customized care plans and a tailored mobile health application to help adolescents and young adults who are childhood cancer survivors take a greater role in managing their health.
The project’s co-investigators are Lamia Barakat, PhD, Lauren Daniel, PhD, MS, Linda Fleisher, PhD, MPH, Jill Ginsberg, MD, Wendy Hobby, MSN, PNP, Linda Jacobs, PhD, MS, Yimei Li, PhD, MS, and Dava Szalda, MD.
The third is a two-year effort (SIP #15-002) that will compare the economic impact and health-related quality of life outcomes among children with cancer who were treated in phase III clinical trials to those who received non-trial standard treatment. Understanding the costs of treatment associated with clinical trial participation is critical in determining if the effects of treatment justify the costs from a societal perspective, including costs borne by the patient and family.
Marilyn Schapira, MD, MPH, is principal investigator of this work and is an associate professor of medicine at the Corporal Michael J. Crescenz Veteran’s Administration Medical Center and co-leader of the Cancer Control Research Program at the Abramson Cancer Center. Co-investigators are Lamia Barakat, PhD, Charles Bailey, MD, PhD, and Jeffrey Silber, MD, PhD.
The UPenn PRC, the first PRC in Philadelphia and one of 26 nationwide, brings together Penn researchers and colleagues from collaborative institutions from a variety of disciplines to conduct innovative public health and disease management research aimed at preventing chronic disease and reducing health disparities in Southeastern Pennsylvania.
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.
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