Last month, a team of USC researchers led by Vaia Lida Chatzi, MD, PhD, a Keck School of Medicine Professor of Population and Public Health Sciences, won an $8 million five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to launch the Southern California Superfund Research and Training Program for PFAS Assessment, Remediation and Prevention Center (ShARP Center). It was a huge accomplishment for not just the team of researchers but also for the Office of Research and Innovation (OORI) who played a large role in helping facilitate the process and contributing to the application.
The ShARP Center will study how Per-and Polyflouroalkyl Substances (PFAS), also known as forever chemicals, affect liver health as well as ways to detect and remove them from public sources of water. PFAS take an outsized amount of time to break down in the human body, and are estimated to be present in the blood of over 99% of adults in the United States. They can have adverse effects on almost every organ in the body, particularly the kidneys and the liver. They have been known to be linked to certain digestive, endocrine, respiratory, mouth, and throat cancers. PFAS are believed to contaminate the public drinking water of an estimated 200 million Americans. Through the ShARP Center, Viterbi researchers plan on exploring ways to remove PFAS from polluted water sources. Planned treatments include the use of special microbes, chemicals, and heating methods for chemical breakdown.
Preceding this award, in 2023, ShARP researchers received a USC President’s Sustainability Initiative Award, facilitated by OORI, which allowed them to gather and publish data on PFAS in Southern California. The President’s Sustainability Initiative Award is given as part of Director of Research Initiatives and Infrastructure Dr. Sivlia da Costa’s internal funding programs unit within OORI. Designed as a holistic approach, drawing on the expansive array of expertise of the researchers involved, the ShARP team set out to address Southern California’s PFAS affliction with $1.25 million in USC OORI funding.
Two years later, Dr. Chatzi and team have the exciting opportunity to drastically expand this project. Drawing on work conducted with OORI funds, the ShARP Center will employ techniques such as 3D spheroid modeling to analyze the effect of PFAS exposure on human liver cells. The ShARP Center will conduct a population study, examining the link between exposure to PFAS and liver disease among the youth who have become an increasingly at-risk group. While currently effective intervention strategies are lacking, the ShARP Center hopes they can contribute to developing new ones as they investigate underlying mechanisms and factors of liver disease.
Taking place over the course of more than a year, the application process saw the proposal go through several NIH evaluations. In that time, ShARP Center researchers expanded their efforts, working with local politicians and community leaders to address the threat of PFAS contamination. Researchers worked closely with Research Strategy and Development (RSD), an office within OORI, to navigate applying. Formed in 2006, RSD is a resource for USC researchers applying for federal funding opportunities. They focus on large, multidisciplinary research efforts. Much of the nuts and bolts of the application process was handled by RSD.
As an office, RSD has contributed to the submission of over 1,000 proposals, contributing to USC receiving over $848 million. For the ShARP proposal, RSD assisted in the writing, editing, and drafting of supplemental documents. This included the editing of biosketches and the drafting of letters. RSD worked closely with Dr. Chatzi and the ShARP team, reviewing content and contributing to the drafting of the budget, graphics, as well as administrative planning. RSD had their hands in many aspects of the proposal including preparations for meetings, grant support, and submission of the proposal. Many meetings were organized with RSD help while RSD personnel were present both in person and over conference calls to discuss the application process.
Now one of less than two dozen Superfund Research Program Centers in the country, the ShARP Center will be comprised of leading researchers from USC Keck including Director of the Center Dr. Chatzi, Drs. Max Aung, Rob McConnell, David Conti, Jesse Goodrich, Jane Steinberg, Ana Maretti-Garcia, and Lucy Golden, researchers from the USC Viterbi School of Engineering including Drs. Adam Smith, Dan McCurry, and Amy Childress as well as researchers from the University of California, Irvine including Drs. Scott Bartell and Veronica Vieira.
Superfund Research Program Centers are meant to unite cross-disciplinary researchers for new innovative outcomes for public health. Created some 35 years ago by NIH’s National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the Superfund Research Program was established in response to the discovered crisis that hazardous waste poses to human health and the environment. The program has played a notable role in supporting research efforts, encouraging collaboration across disciplines, helping connect research outcomes with relevant groups such as regulators, industry representatives, and local communities.