The proposed Alcohol Research Center constitutes the first Los Angeles city-wide Center of Excellence devoted to Studies on Alcoholic Liver and Pancreatic Injury. The Center is created through consolidation of existing collaborative and interactive programs among the established investigators at USC and UCLA. These investigators are unified by the Center's theme, """"""""Elucidation of the mechanisms by which ethanol primes and sensitizes the liver and pancreas for injury"""""""", which illustrates their shared research philosophy and goal. To pursue this theme, the Center will solidify the integration and cross-utilization of the unique and specialized expertise that each participating investigator will contribute to the Center such as animal models, morphology, glutathione homeostasis, oxidative stress, cytoskeletal biology, non-parenchymal liver cell biology, molecular virology, pancreatic acinar cell biology, and signal transduction. The Center will also catalyze cross-utilization of complementary resources by our Center and other existing Centers of Excellence on both campuses (USC Center for Liver Disease, USC Hepatitis C Cooperative Research Center, USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center, UCLA CURE Digestive Disease Research Center) to promote technical and academic synergism and to achieve integrated dissemination of educational activities. In addition to the city-wide approach and the unified Center's theme, the Center is unique in that the intragastric ethanol infusion model (IEI model) serves as an integral component which supports most of the enter research activities directed toward the theme. The center will also be the first to offer the animal or tissue sharing program for the IEI model to non-Center investigators. It is our Center's ultimate goal to establish effective preventive and therapeutic modalities for alcoholic liver and pancreatic diseases via mechanistic delineation of ethanol primes and sensitized these organs.
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