GENERAL CLINICAL RESEARCH CENTER

In 1993, The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston General Clinical Research Center (GCRC) will begin its thirty-second year of its operation in support of the high quality research efforts of a broad spectrum of clinical investigators from the departments of Surgery, Internal Medicine, Obstetrics and Gynecology, Anesthesiology, Pediatrics, Preventive Medicine and Community Health, Dermatology, and Microbiology. They will use cutting edge technology to evaluate questions about normal physiology and metabolism, and abnormal physiology due to diseases such as diabetes, emphysema, bacterial sepsis, trauma, cancer, and AIDS. Mechanisms of cancer development in women will be pursued by one group of investigators and another group is trying to identify substances in the diet that can act to prevent cancer. Several interacting groups are looking at treatment and prevention of health problems that occur during prolonged space flight. A major project is about to begin to study normal aging by evaluating mechanisms of frailty in elderly men. A National Institutes of Health Funded AIDS Clinical Trials Unit (ATCU) is being set up on campus with state-of-the-art resources for conducting studies on treatment of HIV positive persons and on the mechanisms of the AIDS disease process. The GCRC and the ACTU will interact on many phase I, II, AND III clinical trials. The infants of women identified as HIV positive during pregnancy will be carefully followed by and innovative immunologic studies will be performed by Miles Cloyd. A wide spectrum of metabolic questions are being evaluated by many investigators on a large number of protocols using infusions of non-radioactive isotope-labeled substrates and eventual enrichment quantitation in the state-of-the-art stable isotope laboratories of Drs. Wolfe and Klein. Dr. Kuna and his collaborators have at their disposal on the GCRC a newly upgraded sophisticated sleep laboratory, which is being used primarily to measure normal respiratory and pulmonary function during sleep. This group is also evaluating the sleep-related changes in pulmonary function in persons with lung diseases and other respiratory dysfunctions and the impact of drugs on normal and abnormal pulmonary physiology. Dr. Nagamani has determined that women who develop endometrial cancer have very different function of their ovaries which may predispose them to this type of malignancy. She and her collaborators are evaluating potential mechanisms for the ovarian dysfunction and their interaction with tissues of the uterus. Hereditary resistance to the effects of insulin on blood sugar control is being investigated by Stuart and colleagues. They are quantitating in vivo insulin responsiveness and evaluating the structure of the insulin receptor gene for mutations which may cause severe insulin resistance. Advances in understanding normal physiology, space flight adaptation disease processes, response to trauma, AIDS, cancer, and aging are occurring continuously on the GCRC utilizing its space, state-of-the-art equipment, and the highly skilled staff.