National Institutes of Health Awards $11.2 Million to AIMRC

The National Institutes of Health awarded the Arkansas Integrative Metabolic Research Center, or AIMRC, $11.2 million in Phase 2 funding. The funding rewards the successful completion of Phase 1 and is a strong validation of work done over the first five years of the center's existence at the U of A.  

The AIMRC was created to deepen understanding of the role of cell and tissue metabolism in disease, human development and repair processes. Understanding the mechanisms of metabolism could have implications for arresting the spread of cancer, slowing muscular degeneration from aging or hastening wound healing. Clarifying metabolism's role in different disease states could also drive new treatment approaches to conditions like breast cancer, diabetes and obesity, all of which severely impact the state Arkansas. 

But conducting basic and translational research is only the outward facing component of AIMRC's mission. The internal component is the recruitment and professional development of early-career faculty through financial support and formal mentoring from more established faculty. Early-stage faculty pursuing research in the broad area of metabolism receive significant startup funding to help set up their labs. These early-stage faculty can also compete for designation for Research Project Leader designation, which comes with three years of research funding and participation in a structured mentoring program designed to strengthen their applications for major National Institutes of Health (or NIH) and National Science Foundation grants.  

The AIMRC has established three state-of-the-art research core facilities in bioenergetics, imaging and data science to enable Research Project Leaders, as well as affiliated faculty across campus, to conduct experiments and collect data to advance their research program. Ideally, they "graduate" when they secure their first major grant. Graduates can then act as mentors for the next class of Research Project Leaders. 

"Phase 2 gives us the opportunity to expand, both in terms of the number of faculty and in contributing to the research vision of campus," said Narasimhan Rajaram, director of the AIMRC.  

To date, AIMRC-affiliated researchers have been awarded $52.5 million in external funding, with almost $20 million of that funding generated by early-career faculty. The center currently brings together 61 faculty from eight departments and five colleges. Rajaram intends to use this foundation to level up grant support during Phase 2, with the goal of earning $75-80 million in external research funding over the next five years. 

While the core work of recruiting, developing and launching young faculty into successful careers remains the same, he thinks the growing corps of affiliated faculty will make the center more competitive for large, collaborative and multi-disciplinary grants. 

"Now, compared to 2021, we have plenty of individual faculty members who are very successful," Rajaram said. "And the nice thing is it cuts across colleges. Now we can go back to previously successful faculty and say, 'Let's form teams and go after larger grants.' I think individual grants give you a slow but steady increase in research funding, which is good. But it's team science that will really get us to where we want to go as a university." 

Here he is referencing Chancellor Charles Robinson's 150 Forward goal of the university reaching $500 million in research expenditures by 2032. 

While Phase 2 funding provides for the continued recruitment of early-career faculty, it also gives Rajaram's team the latitude to recruit already established faculty outside of the U of A, perhaps to bolster a research area or round out the expertise on a multidisciplinary team. 

AIMRC will be eligible for Phase 3 funding in five years, at which time the goal is to be self-sustaining.  

PHASE 1

AIMRC was established in 2021 as a Center of Biomedical Research Excellence through an NIH grant of $10.8 million. This federal program supports states that receive lower levels of NIH funding by helping them create a critical mass of researchers and research infrastructure around a desired focus (in the U of A's case, metabolism), enabling associated researchers to compete more effectively for independent research funding. 

The goal of Phase 1 was to establish the foundation of AIMRC, create and build up new research cores in signature support areas and grow the pool of successful metabolic researchers on the U of A campus through a faculty development and mentoring plan. At that time, AIMRC identified three research cores to build around: data science, bioenergetics, and imaging and spectroscopy. The core directors are, respectively, Xintao Wu, a professor of data science; Suresh Thallapuranam, a University Professor of chemistry and biochemistry; and Timothy Muldoon, a professor of biomedical engineering.  

Altogether, AIMRC provided substantial financial support to 15 junior faculty in Phase 1. 

The Early-Stage Researchers 

Graduated Research Project Leaders from the U of A who received major NIH grants include Adam Paré, assistant professor of biological sciences; Younghye Song, an associate professor of biomedical engineering; Xuan Zhuang, an assistant professor of biological sciences; and Jian Zhang, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering.  

Other AIMRC-supported early-career faculty who received significant NIH funding include Chenguang Fan, an assistant professor of biochemistry; Kevin Murach, an associate professor of exercise science (who has since taken a position at the University of Missouri); Megan Rexius, an assistant professor of chemical engineering; and Isabelle R. Miousse, an assistant professor at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. 

Current Research Project Leaders include Amy Poe, an assistant professor of cell and molecular biology; Joanna Fiddler, an assistant professor of human nutrition; and Megan Rosa-Caldwell, an assistant professor of exercise science. A fourth opening for a Research Project Leader is in the process of being filled.