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News Releases
Physician Receives $225,000, Three-Year Scleroderma Grant
Columbia, Mo. (Sept. 25, 2001) - A $225,000, three-year grant to study scleroderma has been awarded to University of Missouri-Columbia rheumatologist Robert W. Hoffman, D.O.
Hoffman is a physician and researcher affiliated with the Missouri Arthritis Rehabilitation Research and Training Center (MARRTC).
Hoffman directs the MU School of Medicine's Division of Immunology and Rheumatology and is a member of the Department of Veterans Affair Medical Research Service at the Harry S. Truman Memorial Veterans Hospital.
He also is the director of MU's Antinuclear Antibody Testing Laboratory (ANA Laboratory), an internationally recognized research and clinical referral laboratory.
The grant is a new grant from the National Institutes of Health. The grant was awarded August 1, 2001, with funding to start Oct. 1, 2001. The grant was awarded to Hoffman and fellow MU rheumatologist Eric Gredinger, M.D., co-director of the ANA Lab.
Scleroderma is an autoimmune disease that affects the skin with fibrosis and inflammation. Scleroderma can also affect the lungs, heart and digestive track.
An autoimmune disease is one in which the body's immune system attacks its own cells and tissues.
With this grant, Hoffman and Gredinger will continue their research into the basic mechanisms of disease in scleroderma and possible links between the disease, programmed cell death and autoantibodies.
Programmed cell death, or apoptosis, is the natural death of a cell at the end of its life cycle.
In a healthy body, apoptosis or programmed cell death is involved in development, immune cell proliferation, preventing cancer and controlling inflammation.
During the process of programmed cell death, changes occur in the proteins of the cell, signaling the body that it is time for the cell to die.
It is the changes in cell proteins that Hoffman seeks to further investigate.
Hoffman will probe whether autoimmune disease may be linked or triggered by changes in cell proteins. Hoffman seeks to assess whether the change in cell proteins causes the body to attack the now-changed protein because it now seems altered, or foreign.
If there is a link, understanding how the body responds to changes in cell proteins could provide some insight into other autoimmune diseases such as lupus, mixed connective tissue diseases and others.
This new study builds on Hoffman's and Gredinger's previously conducted work on lupus and mixed connective tissue disease.
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