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NOAA center to study oceans, human health by Dick Peterson Public Relations Funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) will establish an NOAA Center of Excellence for Oceans and Human Health at the Hollings Marine Laboratory, located at the S.C. Marine Resources Center at Fort Johnson. Members of NOAA's Center of Excellence for Oceans and Human Health. The center is expected to receive about $1.5 million per year for five years and will tap the experience and diverse skills of the five partners at the South Carolina Marine Resources Center. With NOAA are the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the S.C. Department of Natural Resources, the College of Charleston and MUSC. NOAA has established three centers: the Hollings Marine Laboratory, and others in Seattle, Wash., and Ann Arbor, Mich. “This new center will allow the Hollings Marine Laboratory to focus an unparalleled combination of basic, applied and biomedical research expertise, ranging from coastal ecology and physiology to advanced molecular biology, chemistry and toxicology on the health of the oceans and their effect on people,” said Hollings Marine Lab director and principal investigator of the project Fred Holland, Ph.D.  “These are questions not adequately answered by current monitoring and assessment programs. Are the fish and shellfish safe to eat? Is it safe to swim in the water? What can we do to make them safe?” Holland explained that the center’s research will develop genetic techniques to evaluate the health of marine organisms, identify and develop measurement methods for emerging chemical contaminants of concern, identify and determine the sources of micro-organisms that threaten public health, and evaluate the health benefits and risks of seafood. He said MUSC researchers at the laboratory will use their cell and molecular genetic expertise to develop biotechnology that probes the effects of coastal ecosystems on marine organisms and human health. “We can now begin to plan the integrated monitoring and assessment programs of the future that will provide resource managers the information they need to forecast environmental problems before they have caused irreversible harm, and take the necessary actions to minimize impacts on the environment and humans,” Holland said. He sees the center  at the laboratory as a major opportunity for all its partners. During the past several decades, most state and federal environmental monitoring and assessment programs have made major advances in their designs and applications.  “We know where to sample, what to measure, and how to accurately document the condition of the marine environment,” Holland said. “Unfortun-ately, the measures or indicators we use do not provide early enough warning, nor do they include direct measures of potential impacts to humans.”  The center will allow NOAA and its partners to develop sensitive and early warning indicators of the health of marine organisms and direct measures of potential impacts on human health, Holland said. The technologies will be incorporated into the environmental monitoring and assessment programs used by future generations. “Also, the integration of the diverse data that are produced by the center, especially the early warning signals, will allow NOAA to predict future environmental conditions and potential impacts on public health in time to take corrective actions,” Holland added. “It just makes sense to have all the organizations at the South Carolina Marine Resources Center at Fort Johnson conducting collaborative research. The collective capacity of the organizations is much greater than the sum of its parts.”   He said the Hollings Marine Laboratory was the first step, and the Center of Excellence in Oceans and Human Health expands the concept to the next logical step.  “This center will provide new opportunities for basic and applied researchers, graduate and undergraduate students and educators, public health officials, environmental and natural resource managers and the public at large,” Holland concluded.   MUSC a major beneficiary of NOAA center MUSC researchers at the Hollings Marine Laboratory have reason to cheer recent news of plans by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Admini-stration for an NOAA Center of Excellence in Oceans and Human Health there. The center will open new areas of investigation, using MUSC cell and molecular genetic research to probe the effects of the coastal waters ecosystem on human health, said director of MUSC’s Marine Biomedicine and Environmental Sciences Center Eric Lacy, Ph.D. The research could lead to development of an early warning system that would flag environmental stressors before they affect human health or create irreversible damage to the oceans. NOAA’s investment in the center, one of three in the U.S. and the only one on the East Coast, will amount to $1.5 million per year for the next five years. Its creation marks a directional shift in NOAA’s focus from how humans affect oceans to include how oceans affect humans.  The unique, five-institution collaborative attracted the attention of NOAA officials, who called for grant applications to establish the center.  “When the call came out for federal center grants on oceans and human health, we were uniquely suited to be very competitive,” Lacy said. “We’ve got all the infrastructure including medicine at MUSC, environmental assessment of contaminants and ecosystem monitoring from our Fort Johnson partners, exceedingly strong integrated graduate programs, a new 80,000-square-foot marine biotechnology lab, the Hollings Marine Lab, and we’re sitting on a campus next to a NOAA facility, the National Ocean Service Lab.” The Hollings Marine Laboratory partnership has worked, Lacy said. “We’re a real partner enterprise. This grant will take the strengths of all the partners at Fort Johnson and focus them on the interrelationships of oceans and human health.” Lacy said that without the National Ocean Service Laboratory, MUSC could never have landed the grant on its own, and he doubts whether the NOAA facility at Fort Johnson could have received the nod from the granting agency without the research in human health component MUSC supplied. “The mix was just right,” Lacy said. “We came together, formalized the relationship, strengthened it, went for the grant and were successful.” Lacy said the $7.5-million, five-year grant formalizes the research focus on the relationship between ecosystem health and human health, a central vision in the establishment of the Hollings Marine Laboratory. The NOAA grant will build the lab’s infrastructure. It will bring in needed equipment, technical and scientific expertise, and new research initiatives, which will also provide expanded graduate training for MUSC students.  “It will open new areas of collaborative research and allow us to do things we haven’t done before.” he said. MUSC researcher Greg Warr, Ph.D., Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, has his lab in the Hollings Marine Laboratory and is part of the Functional Marine Genomics program there. He said MUSC brings to the community of institutions at Fort Johnson “the level of expertise we have in cellular and molecular genetic research at MUSC. We now have the opportunity to apply that expertise in a completely new area: the relationship of the marine environment to human health.” Warr explained that the impact of the oceans on human health cannot be understood without a fully integrated picture.  “We need to know what impact humans are having on the marine environment,” he said,  “and then we need to feed that back to know what impact changes in the marine environment are going to have on humans on the coastal zone using the oceans for recreation and seafood.”  At this stage it is very difficult to tease apart the various components of this problem. “What we have to do is what medical school graduate students are trained to do best: fundamental research,” Warr said. “We have to get the most information about the marine environment and take that information through very real assessments of significance to human health.” “We’re moving down the road to using very sensitive early warning indicators of environmental stress and perturba-tions,” said Fred Holland, director of Hollings Marine Laboratory and the Oceans and Human Health Center. “That’s where MUSC’s contributions come in,” Lacy said.  The biomedical research being conducted by MUSC researchers at the Hollings Marine Laboratory  can provide many of the molecular biology and genomics-based tools needed to perform what he calls eco-forecasting: detecting the earliest signs of environmental stress by monitoring an organism’s genomic response to environmental conditions long before it becomes sick, dies and alters the marine ecosystem.  “That’s the bridge between MUSC and NOAA,” he said. “This genomic predictive approach has been taken in human medicine, and it is time that we now expand it into the marine environment. My hope with the integration of genomics into environ-mental studies is that we get early warning of environmental change and understand the consequences for the health of the human population. “Early warning becomes a critical factor in environmental monitoring as the effects of humans living on the coast and their activities in and around coastal waters become more apparent. There is no better place to study this than Charleston, South Carolina.” Holland and Lacy see a new pollution problem on the horizon, “things we don’t normally think about,” Lacy said. These are the “recycled pharmaceuticals” that were taken initially by individuals or livestock for a specific target.  “Like cholesterol-reducing drugs— they are eliminated through the body and go into a sewage treatment plant, but treatment there doesn’t remove them from the environment.”  Once the treated water is released back into the environment, organisms such as marine worms and oysters take up the chemicals.  “We eat the fish, which ate the worm, which ate the cholesterol-reducing drugs,” Lacy said. “We are now taking this drug and many other pharmaceuticals that were never prescribed for us. How does that affect human health and development? And that’s just one of the tens, if not hundreds of pharmaceuticals out there.”  He cited birth control drugs, analgesics such as aspirin and ibuprophen, antacids and antibiotics as compounds that pass through the body without being completely absorbed. The drugs are subsequently ingested by the population as a whole. “This grant is one of many scientific initiatives at Hollings Marine Lab that brings the partners together at the interface of oceans and human health,” Lacy said. “The size, duration and inclusiveness of this particular grant, which has formed a national center of excellence, provides an unusual opportunity to develop outstanding research programs. These state and federal giants have been sitting side by side for years, and now we have a meaningful marriage in an exciting new endeavor that links the strengths of both institutions.   Friday, Sept. 17, 2004 Catalyst Online is published weekly, updated as needed and improved from time to time by the MUSC Office of Public Relations for the faculty, employees and students of the Medical University of South Carolina. Catalyst Online editor, Kim Draughn, can be reached at 792-4107 or by email, catalyst@musc.edu. Editorial copy can be submitted to Catalyst Online and to The Catalyst in print by fax, 792-6723, or by email to petersnd@musc.edu or catalyst@musc.edu. To place an ad in The Catalyst hardcopy, call Community Press at 849-1778.