Seed grants tackle key environmental health challenges

September 20, 2024

The UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health and Triangle-area nonprofit research organization RTI International leveraged their shared expertise to tackle important challenges related to health and the environment. Through this initiative, the two institutions provided a series of seed grants to joint-RTI and UNC Gillings research teams to establish collaborations and spark progress in key areas.

The three research projects carried out under this initiative address important information gaps related to environmental health: they developed a noninvasive way to measure children’s exposure to toxicants in the environment, conducted investigations into how emissions from cookstoves interact with the environment to develop a fuller picture of the threats they pose to health, and developed a tool to provide useful information about antimicrobial resistance to policy makers.

The projects were launched by the UNC Gillings-RTI International Preferred Partnership under the Initiative to Maximize Partnerships and Catalyze Teamwork (IMPACT) program in 2017 to showcase shared expertise related to environmental health by supporting promising early research.

Anne Glauber

“The initiative not only catalyzed collaboration and generated a series of useful publications, tools and follow-on funding,” said Anne Glauber, MPH, associate director of innovation at the Gillings School. “It also helped establish professional relationships that will live beyond the scope of the projects.”

Researchers who were awarded seed funding indicated that this type of funding can help them develop working relationships, collect data and create publications that will add to the knowledge base with the hope of attracting funding from other sources for subsequent research.

Dr. Juliana Ruzante

“The development of the professional network was a great opportunity,” said Juliana Ruzante, PhD, research public health analyst at RTI who co-led the project related to antibiotic resistance. “It gave us the chance to really get to know the research, areas of interest and each other, building a lasting bond between the researchers that can more quickly be leverage for future opportunities.”

IMPACT projects include:

Dr. Rebecca Fry

The Children’s Environmental Solutions Study

Dr. Keith Levine

(CHESS) responds to a need for a minimally invasive way to assess children’s exposure to toxic metals, which are present in the environment across North Carolina and pose harm to developing fetuses. The study team, led by Rebecca Fry, PhD, Carol Remmer Angle Distinguished Professor in children’s environmental health at the Gillings School, and Keith Levine, PhD, vice president of RTI’s Center for Analytical Sciences, worked to optimize the use of  blood spots to determine exposure.

Because blood spots are collected for every newborn, developing the ability to use them in this way will greatly expand the opportunities to study important questions related to the chemicals in our environment and their effects on the health of children. Growing concerns about understudied impacts of industrial activity as well as increasing demand on water resources make these questions more urgent than ever.  The project examined samples from an existing study, Environment, Perinatal Outcomes, and Children’s Health, based at UNC.

Dr. Jill Stewart

The  Surveillance, Modeling, Analytics Risk Assessment Tool for Evidence-Responsive Anti-Microbial Resistance (SMARTER-AMR) project was led by Jill Stewart, PhD, Philip C. Singer Distinguished Professor of environmental sciences and engineering at the Gillings School and  Ruzante. This project addresses the challenge of antibiotic resistance from a One Health perspective, which focuses on the many links between the health of humans and nonhuman animals.

The goal of the project was to develop platforms to make data about growing antimicrobial resistance available to policymakers and government agencies responsible for public health, water, agriculture and land use, so that this information may guide their decisions where applicable.

The Toxicity of Complex Aerosols from Wood Burning Cook Stoves (TOCS) explores another understudied public health issue that affects rural North Carolinians as well as the residents of many low-or-middle-income countries. In both settings, it is common for families to rely on wood-burning stoves for heat and or cooking. Though the practice is widespread, there is a paucity of evidence related to what chemicals wood-burning stoves release, how those chemicals interact with others in the environment and the effects of both on health.

Dr. William Vizuete

Ryan Chartier

The TOCS project, led by Will Vizuete, PhD, professor of environmental sciences and engineering at the Gilling School, and Ryan Chartier, MS, research chemist at RTI, developed and tested a method to measure the presence of chemicals related to the burning of biomass, such as wood. This new method is more portable and accurate than those previously available and is expected to become the standard for studying these types of emissions. This project will lead to a better understanding of the chemicals present in air and more accurate models to predict and manage air quality and its health impacts that will guide policies and interventions globally.

These three projects focused on improving basic public health tools and infrastructure that future work can build on. In the process, they generated a series of useful publications and tools and spurred follow-on funding for further investigation.

The SMARTER-AMR project informed work to create a dashboard to monitor antimicrobial resistance in animals. A similar system tracks resistance among humans, but no such system exists for animal agriculture, which accounts for a larger overall share of antibiotic use. This project led to the publication of a peer-reviewed article exploring the feasibility of establishing such a system and paved the way for two awards from the United States Department of Agriculture. It also informed presentations to lawmakers.

In addition to developing new, commercially available technology to screen drivers of air toxicity, the TOCS grant led to multiple publications, guidance for future experiments, and a more complete picture of the gases, aerosols and biomarkers associated with biomass burning. It also led to opportunities for follow-on funding through the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the United Kingdom’s natural Environment Research Council.

The CHESS study has four potential avenues for follow-on funding through the NIH and NIEHS, and several manuscripts are being prepared for publication. In addition to propelling a parallel study that involved the collection of water samples, the CHESS study collected highly novel data from blood spots and may lead to a completely new source of data for studies of environmental exposure among infants.

Together, these three grants are helping researchers at the Gillings School and RTI develop a clearer picture of how environmental factors affect health outcomes by increasing the accuracy and availability of relevant information for policymakers. In the process, the projects they enabled cultivated relationships among scientists, funders and others with shared interest and expertise in environmental health issues and developed the skills and expertise of the researchers and students who worked on them.

Contact the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health communications team at sphcomm@unc.edu.