Spotlight on research

Gene therapy for osteoarthritis

UF researchers are developing a gene therapy technique that could help both humans and horses fight osteoarthritis, a debilitating condition that causes inflammation and deterioration of the joints. The goal is to create a one-time treatment that works long term. The research team, led by Steven Ghivizzani, Ph.D., received a highly competitive one-year, $900,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Arthritis, Musculoskeletal and Skin Disease to fund the work. The new effort will expand laboratory studies into trials that better approximate osteoarthritis in humans. The work will involve the use of viruseås, called adeno-associated viruses, or AAV, as vehicles to deliver genetic material to the joints of horses, where it would produce a therapeutic protein directly at the site of the disease. For more on this story, visit news.health.ufl.edu. — Czerne M. Reid

Partnerships to benefit India

UF has received $1.1 million from the National Institutes of Health’s Fogarty International Center to offer behavioral health training to colleagues in three Indian cities and increase research opportunities between the university and Indian partners. “Our goal is to reduce the training gap and increase research in perpetration and exposure to violence, addiction to prescribed and illicit drugs, and the most impairing mental symptoms — psychosis, suicidal thoughts and dementia,” said the grant’s lead investigator Linda B. Cottler, Ph.D., M.P.H., a professor and chair of the department of epidemiology in UF’s colleges of Public Health and Health Professions and Medicine. In addition to creating training and research opportunities, the project will shed much-needed light on the health problems in certain Indian regions. For more on this story, visit phhp.ufl.edu. — Jill Pease