December 27, 2009

Meharry Researchers Named Tennesseans of the Year

Their groundbreaking work on AIDS, women’s health issues and other medical concerns earns them honor

Usually, the Tennessean of the Year award goes to a single Tennessean. One person, doing one extraordinary thing.

This year the award, as determined by readers and The Tennessean’s editorial board, goes to a multitude — a small army in white lab coats, on a mission to save the world.

The medical researchers at Nashville’s Meharry Medical College spend their careers serving the medically underserved. They research the diseases that scourge minority communities, and they work to end health-care disparities in a state that regularly ranks rock-bottom on almost every national health survey.

Tennesseans are more likely to die of cancer, to suffer heart attack and stroke, to be dangerously obese, than residents of almost any other state in the nation. If you’re poor or a minority, or if you live in a remote rural area or a blighted urban neighborhood, the health-care picture is even bleaker.

Ending those disparities has been Meharry’s mission for more than a century.
"We’re very humbled and honored, and very gratified," Meharry President Wayne J. Riley said upon hearing that the 130-year-old institution’s researchers had been named Tennesseans of the Year. "We’re gratified that people are going to hear about the wonderful work we are conducting very quietly in North Nashville."

AIDS work draws big-time grant

Meharry researchers work out of cramped, aging research buildings, at a school with an endowment that’s dwarfed by those of the larger research institutions that compete with them for research grants. Over the years, their research has yielded innovations ranging from chemical condoms that fight the spread of AIDS in Africa to heart pills that can be targeted to treat African-Americans.

Last year, Meharry researcher James Hildreth made global headlines when he developed an odorless, undetectable contraceptive cream that destroys the AIDS virus and holds the promise of stopping the disease’s spread in African countries with a cultural taboo against contraceptives. The National Institutes of Health recently recognized the school’s work with a $21.4 million grant to establish the Meharry Clinic and Translational Research Center, which will conduct clinical human trials focusing on cures and treatments for HIV and women’s health issues.

"We have an obligation to serve our community. They may call it noble, but it’s in our DNA," said researcher Darryl B. Hood, who knows a fair bit about DNA.

Meharry is being honored for the extraordinary efforts of people like Hood, who spent the first half of his career figuring out the link between autism and air pollution and who probably will spend the rest of his professional life figuring out a cure.

Meharry gave Fernando Villalta the resources and the time — 23 years so far — to unravel the mysteries of Chagas disease, an obscure parasitic disease that most Tennesseans have never heard of. But when Villalta comes up with the cure — and he’s very, very close — and donates his research to the World Health Organization, millions of lives will change for the better.

"The concept of health disparities was not very popular 50 years ago. It wasn’t on everybody’s radar screens back then," said Russell Poland, Meharry’s vice president for research. "But for a handful of institutions, it became a mission."

That mission takes researchers out of the lab and into the field. For prostate cancer researcher Flora Ukoli, it wasn’t enough just to study a disease that is decimating African-American men. She also had to figure out why those same men are so reluctant to go in for lifesaving prostate screenings.

Ukoli is studying the role of diet in prostate cancer rates. African-American men get prostate cancer at much higher rates than either white Americans or black men in Africa, and she believes a high-fat diet may be to blame.

But when she realized that many men she was studying were suspicious of health-care workers who urged them to get a prostate screening — a test many believed would be expensive and humiliating — she trained the Meharry custodial staff to talk to men in the waiting rooms about prostate screenings.

"We found that men responded best when they heard about (the screenings) from a peer, like a layman," Ukoli said. "The janitors are all over the place anyway; (now) they’re giving out (prostate health) fliers."

Health disparity is the focus

Meharry takes a broad view of what constitutes health disparity. There’s the fact that some diseases hit some racial groups harder than others — black men die of prostate cancer at twice the rate of white men; Pima Indians in the Southwest have the highest rate of diabetes in the world.

Hood’s autism research starkly illustrates how researching a disadvantaged group can yield a cure that will benefit everyone. Hood and his colleagues study the effect of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, found in smog and auto exhaust, on fetal brain development.

The most polluted neighborhoods tend to be the poorest neighborhoods. That’s where governments tend to site their landfills, factories, waste incinerators and coal-fire plants — which is what the nearby residents and their children grow up breathing.

Hood and his colleagues monitored a group of pregnant women in Harlem and Washington Heights, N.Y., who lived directly downwind from the Jersey factories. They tracked the development of babies born to women in the most polluted areas and found that they were far more likely to suffer cognitive problems, ranging from autism to attention-deficit disorder to learning disabilities. By the time they were 5 years old, these children scored an average of 5 points lower on IQ tests than their peers.

"Years ago, people didn’t talk about the effects of environmental toxins. They just said the child was slow," said Hood, whose work now is focusing on a therapy that may someday be given to newborns to reverse the effects of the poisons they were exposed to in the womb.

"This is my life’s work," he said.

Villalta’s life work will be the eradication of a disease unknown to most Tennesseans and abandoned by the big drug companies as too unprofitable to research. Chagas disease is a potentially lethal parasitic infection that affects between 8 million and 11 million people, mostly in Latin America.

"The drugs we have are very few and extremely toxic, and they don’t cure the chronic form of the disease," said Villalta, who sits surrounded in his office by monitors displaying the genetic structure of a disease he has devoted a quarter-century to curing.

Villalta and his colleagues have isolated the parasite’s genetic markers and are developing a drug that will target the parasite, inhibit it from reproducing and kill it, without harming the host. The research is very promising, he said.

The drug promises to cure not only Chagas disease but also African sleeping sickness, another parasitic disease that affects as many as 30 million people. The drug also could treat a disease that has plagued U.S. soldiers deployed overseas in recent years: leishmaniasis, a parasite transmitted by the bite of the sand fly that can attack the skin, causing terrible lesions, or the internal organs, with sometimes fatal results.

More than 700 people cast their vote for Tennessean of the Year this year. Other nominees were Keith Urban, for his fundraising efforts on behalf of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum; Nashville restaurateur Randy Rayburn, who spearheaded the 2007 campaign to ban smoking in Tennessee restaurants and the more recent campaign to keep guns out of bars; Hedy Weinberg, marking her 25th year as executive director of the Tennessee chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union; and Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen.

While all are working to make Tennessee a better place, Meharry researchers are doing it one disease at a time, one cure at a time, one life at a time.

"We’re very honored," Riley said. "On behalf of all of us, from the those of us who teach to those of us who mop the floors, thank you."