UofL has joined 684 universities and research centers throughout the world to advise the United Nations on sustainable development. The announcement was made today at the Louisville Sustainability Summit, which UofL is hosting for the first time. 

“Inclusion in this international effort recognizes our efforts over the decades to impact our world in a meaningful way when it comes to sustainability,” said UofL President Neeli Bendapudi. “From the Conn Center looking for renewable energy sources and our university-wide efforts to reduce our carbon footprint to our recent creation of the Envirome Institute that focuses on health sustainability, we have a long history of trying to leave a better planet.”

Additionally, UofL will be a founding member of the U.S. Solutions Network later this year.

 “The UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network is honored to welcome the University of Louisville to the global network,” said Columbia University Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs, advisor to the Secretary General of the UN and director of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network. “The SDSN looks forward to working closely with the Envirome Institute and city and community leaders to advance the Sustainable Development Goals. Our efforts together will help to advance well being in Louisville and around the world.”

The national and regional networks support the localization of the 17 goals set out by the UN and agreed to by 193 nations in 2015. Local networks will promote long-term pathways for sustainable development, promote high-quality education and research collaboration for sustainable development, and support governments in understanding and addressing the challenges of sustainable development.

Through these efforts, the networks are working to create a future in which poverty has been eradicated, the planet is protected and people are ensured the ability to enjoy peace and prosperity.

“We feel a tremendous sense of responsibility to be a founding member of this nation’s grassroots effort,” Bendapudi said. “All of us at the university in collaboration with our community partners look forward to spearheading efforts to better understand how our environment, in the broadest sense of the word, impacts us as individuals.”

Led by Aruni Bhatnagar, Ph.D., the Smith and Lucille Gibson Chair in Medicine, the UofL Envirome Institute takes a holistic approach to researching how the human-environment interrelationship impacts peoples’ lives. In addition to building on Bhatnagar’s pioneering work establishing the field of environmental cardiology, UofL will incorporate community engagement and citizen science to introduce a singular, new approach to the study of health.

“Our researchers, staff and students will explore new concepts associated with examining the elements of a single person’s overall environment and determine how that affects their lives. The impact this will have will be felt well beyond Louisville,” Bendapudi said.

Taking a holistic approach to researching how the human-environment interrelationship impacts peoples’ lives, the institute will build on the pioneering work of Aruni Bhatnagar, PhD, the institute’s director, in the field of environmental cardiology. The institute will incorporate community engagement and citizen science to introduce a singular, new approach to the study of health.

Twenty-five years ago, the Human Genome Project completed the first map of our genetic code, revealing how our genes relate to our health, and potentially our susceptibility to disease. Built on a new vision of health, the Envirome Institute pioneers actionable knowledge about all forms of health and how they are affected by the environment beyond genomics. This gift from Brown catalyzes existing resources and adds new capabilities toward the ambitious, long-term mission of studying the human envirome with the same precision and rigor applied to decoding the human genome.

“All of us at the University of Louisville are grateful to Christina Lee Brown for the trust she has put in us to tackle such a large and complex idea as how our broad environment impacts our lives,” Bendapudi said. “Her generosity will enable our group of researchers, staff and students to explore new concepts associated with exploring the elements of a single person’s overall environment and determine how that affects their lives. The impact this will have will be felt well beyond Louisville.”

“This isn’t just the University of Louisville’s Human Envirome Institute. It is Louisville’s Human Envirome Institute,” Brown said, “Each of us, individually, must put health, broadly understood, in the center of all of our public and private efforts. And we are encouraged by the will and determination of the new president, Neeli Bendapudi, to immediately step in and support the Institute’s efforts and importance to both the city of Louisville and the university.”

“Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity — the University of Louisville serves as the perfect home for this new unique, holistic, interdisciplinary, educational model. It is truly a world-class organization,” Bhatnagar said.

The institute will open a door to a healthier future in Louisville and across the globe. The research of Bhatnagar and colleagues has pioneered the field of environmental cardiology and begun to uncover the important influence of the environment on heart disease. The institute, by studying the relationship of our health to the natural and the social world around us, will amplify the potential of this broad and promising territory.

Humans live in complex, variable and diverse environments that are fashioned by their unique mix of history, culture and social organization. Until recently, we lacked the material and conceptual tools required for studying the health effects of the natural, social, cultural and economic dimensions of the human environment as a whole. As in the graphic Circle of Harmony and Health (below), health should be understood holistically as psychological, intellectual, spiritual, cultural, nutritional, economic and environmental health.

This institute serves as a unifying capstone organization over several existing centers including the Diabetes and Obesity Center, the Superfund Research Center and the Tobacco Regulation and Addiction Center. Together these centers have successfully attracted more than $100 million in extramural funds over the past decade. This new interdisciplinary, connected institute creates new potential to expand those resources significantly. Additionally, a Center for Healthy Air, Water and Soil will be established within the Envirome Institute to advance the work that the Louisville community began five years ago.

The Envirome Institute also introduces a more public science and opens a welcoming door for the residents of Louisville. Enviromics can involve the participation of whole communities in the process of data collection as well as in the benefits from health initiatives that may be free or subsidized. As part of a medical institution, the institute is committed to healing and helping turn discovery into actionable change, with Louisville as a living, urban laboratory.

Institute’s makeup

Located across Belknap Campus and the Health Sciences Center, the Envirome Institute will provide an umbrella for the following centers:

• Diabetes and Obesity Center
• Center for Integrated Environmental Health Sciences
• American Heart Association Tobacco Regulation and Addiction Center
• Superfund Research Center
• Center for Healthy Air, Water and Soil
• Center for Environmental Policy and Management
• Center for Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences

Check out footage from today’s press conference below.

At least in terms of management of University of Louisville Hospital and the James Graham Brown Cancer Center.

On July 1, University Medical Center again took over as manager of the two facilities following four years of a joint operating agreement with KentuckyOne Health. Both companies agreed in December to dissolve the JOA.

“While it appears that it is the ‘good old days’ it truly is a new era,” said Ken Marshall, president and chief executive officer of UofL Hospital and the James Graham Brown Cancer Center. “In the coming years, we will be a leader in our region for providing the highest quality of care in a patient-centered way. All the while, UofL Hospital will continue be the primary adult teaching hospital for the UofL School of Medicine and provide care to all who come to our doors.”

Marshall and his team have accomplished in approximately six months what typically takes at least a year – stand up an entire organization. This includes creating the executive team, hiring an entire staff and putting into place everything necessary so that patients who need care have the best experience possible.

“We were fortunate in that every single person who had been working at UofL Hospital and the Brown Cancer Center accepted our offer to continue working there under UMC management,” said Shari Kretzschmer, chief nursing officer. “This eliminated a significant amount of time in recruiting and training staff. But we continue to bring on more, high-quality staff so that the care we provide is unsurpassed in its quality.”

Some services will be purchased from KentuckyOne Health on a short-term basis, lasting no longer than 18 months. These are services such as information technology and group purchasing.

“The effort of the entire team during the past six months has been Herculean,” Marshall said. “The collaboration with our physician leadership cannot be stressed enough. What we have seen is emblematic of the attitude all of us share – it’s about our patients.”

Combining the efforts of Norton Cancer Institute and Norton Children’s Hospital, in affiliation with University of Louisville, Norton Children’s Cancer Institute will provide improved access and additional services to care for children fighting cancer. This includes new programs for treating rare tumors and benign blood disorders, such as sickle cell anemia, as well as a revamped program for bone marrow transplants.

In addition to offering new types of care, Norton Children’s Cancer Institute has three primary goals:

• Increase the number of clinical trials offered to patients and gain access to new therapies in their earliest stages
• Develop additional groundbreaking research and cutting-edge technology
• Recruit additional hematology/oncology specialists and medical students to improve patients’ access to care.

“We expect Norton Children’s Cancer Institute to be the beacon of hope for families not just in Metro Louisville, but throughout the entire commonwealth,” said Thomas D. Kmetz, division president, Women’s and Children’s Services and Norton Children’s Hospital. “This collaboration will create an even more unified focus on delivering unparalleled cancer care to children fighting this terrible disease.”

“This is our chance for Louisville to become nationally recognized in the world of pediatric cancer research and gain access to the most cutting-edge clinical trials,” said Joseph M. Flynn, DO, MPH, FACP, executive director and physician-in-chief, Norton Cancer Institute. “We see this affiliation as an opportunity to combine our resources and expertise to give kids the best treatment there is.”

The University of Louisville will provide physician support for Norton Children’s Cancer Institute. Norton Healthcare will commit $1 million to UofL per year for pediatric oncology research and physician recruitment, as well as offer leadership and support staff for the institute.

“The relationship between Norton Children’s Hospital and the University of Louisville leading to the creation of Norton Children’s Cancer Institute is to forge a productive collaboration in the battle against childhood cancer,” said Toni Ganzel, MD, MBA, executive dean for the UofL Health Sciences Center. “The within the UofL School of Medicine has been part of one of medicine’s greatest successes in the sharp rise in survival rates of children with cancer.

“With more survivors, there is an urgent need to understand the effect of treatments on the entire body, not just the cancer. With a multidisciplinary approach and comprehensive treatment and support services, Norton Children’s Cancer Institute will have at its core a sense of urgency not only in bringing newer therapies to accelerate childhood cancer survival rates but also to intently focus on the survivors and alert them to potential risks, including serious and sometimes life-threatening complications, as late effects of cancer treatments.”

Within Norton Children’s Cancer Institute, inpatients will continue to be treated at the Addison Jo Blair Cancer Care Center in Norton Children’s Hospital. For outpatients, the institute will occupy the fourth floor of the University of Louisville’s new 170,000-square-foot pediatric medical office building at 401 E. Chestnut St. The facility is still under construction and is expected to be completed in July 2018.

With more than 8,000 pediatric cancer visits each year, Norton Children’s Hospital is home to the country’s oldest children’s oncology program, continually accredited by the American College of Surgeons’ Commission on Cancer (CoC) since 1959. As the teaching facility for the University of Louisville School of Medicine Department of Pediatrics, Norton Children’s Hospital is dedicated to its mission of serving the children of this community and region.

Learn more about the Norton Children’s Cancer Institute .

Craig McClain, MD, UofL’s associate vice president for health affairs/research, is the principal investigator and head of a team that has received a Centers of Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE) grant from the National Institutes of Health to explore diseases of the liver — hepatobiology and toxicology.

“Dr. McClain and his team are among not only the nation’s leaders, but the world’s leaders when it comes to researching liver diseases,” said Gregory C. Postel, MD, UofL interim executive vice president for health affairs. “Receipt of this grant demonstrates the breadth of the program Dr. McClain has developed through the years and the importance of that work in our understanding the liver function, liver disease and how to combat it.”

The grant, which totals more than $11.5 million throughout five years, brings together experienced senior mentors and promising junior investigators from across the university  in collaboration with scientists throughout the nation and world to perform cross-cutting research on the unique topics of hepatobiology and toxicology. The research will evaluate clinical barriers in the understanding of the development and progression of liver diseases. Additionally, they will define targets for prevention and treatment that may transform current medical practice.

The researchers have four current areas of interest:

• Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and non-alcoholic steatohepatitis, a major cause of cirrhosis of the liver,
• Alcoholic liver disease,
• Environmental toxicology and liver disease, and
• Liver cancer.

Future areas of research include infectious and viral liver disease and drug-induced liver injury.

The liver is the largest internal organ. It plays a vital role in protein, carbohydrate, and fat, as well as micronutrient metabolism and it is the major site for drug and toxicant metabolism/detoxification.

Liver diseases are some of the most common health problems afflicting Americans. Approximately one-third of American adults and 10 to 12 percent of children in the United States have fatty liver disease as a consequence of overweight/obesity. This is by far the most common cause of abnormal liver tests in the nation. Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) represents a spectrum of diseases involving hepatic fat accumulation, inflammation with the potential progression to scarring and cirrhosis over time.

Alcoholic liver disease (ALD) remains a major cause of mortality and morbidity in the United States, and ALD and NAFLD can proceed through the same pathway from simple fatty liver to cirrhosis in some patients. Importantly, there is no FDA-approved therapy for NAFLD or ALD. Liver cancer is the third leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide and is the fifth most common cause of cancer deaths in men in the United States.

“This effort will help ensure a pipeline of new investigators into liver biology and disease, as well as stimulate research into the field,” McClain said. “We will build upon the broad body of knowledge already existing (and) take that information into novel areas to create new methods for the prevention and treatment of liver disease.”

The UofL Center is one of only 20 in the nation. It’s funding score for the grant was the best in the nation, and it is the only center with a nutrition focus.

“We are going to take a unique focus into organ injury associated with alcohol use,” said Dr. Gregory C. Postel, interim executive vice president for health affairs at UofL. “Our researchers are going to examine the interactive role of nutrition and alcohol in the deleterious, as well as beneficial, effects of alcohol on the human body.”

Through four different projects, the research team led by Dr. Craig McClain, associate vice president for translational research and associate vice president for health affairs/research, has three specific aims:

1. Facilitate interdisciplinary approaches and serve as a regional/national resource for the study of nutrition and alcohol-induced organ injury;
2. Provide a robust pilot project program and comprehensive education and research training in order to develop the next generation of alcohol investigators; and
3. Develop potential therapeutic targets/interventions for alcohol-induced organ injury based on the mechanistic research of the center and translate knowledge/interventions to the community.

“This funding will allow us to look at the problems that alcohol abuse causes, as well as the potential benefits of alcohol,” McClain said. “Our focus on dietary nutrition and abuse is unique. For example, only a small proportion of people who abuse alcohol will develop liver disease. We believe that the type of dietary fat intake is critical in the development of alcohol-induced organ injury.”

To find answers, the center will initially focus on four projects.

Project 1 will evaluate the role of dietary unsaturated fat in the development/progression of alcoholic liver disease.

Project 2 will evaluate alcohol-induced alterations in the gut-liver axis. Researchers will examine the role of histone deacetylases (HDACs) in both the intestine and liver in alcohol-induced gut-barrier dysfunction and steatohepatitis and the role of probiotics and dietary HDAC inhibitors in preventing/treating experimental ALD.

Project 3 will determine mechanisms by which maternal alcohol consumption causes mental retardation in the offspring. Researchers will evaluate epigenetic mechanisms by which alcohol induces apoptosis and teratogenesis, and by which the nutraceutical, sulforaphane, provides epigenetic protection.

Project 4 will evaluate mechanisms by which alcohol causes increased susceptibility to acute lung injury. They postulate that chronic alcohol intake triggers extracellular matrix remodeling resulting in “repavement” of lung tissue with a proinflammatory extracelluar matrix and that this process can be modulated by dietary intervention.

“Our studies are designed to look at a number of organ systems, not just the liver,” McClain said. “Additionally, we are very interested in gaining a better understanding of the role alcohol may play during fetal development and the mechanisms associated with fetal alcohol syndrome.”

The research team spans 13 departments at UofL in six schools/colleges.

“One of the keys to developing the breadth of information we hope to achieve is bringing together people with expertise in areas that often are not combined,” McClain said. “It is important that we look at these issues from a broad perspective if we are to examine the overall impacts of alcohol.”

Here is more information about the Alcohol Research Center: 

The new building will be adjacent to the UofL Physicians Outpatient Center, located at 401 E. Chestnut St.

Planning for the building began in January 2015 and Architectural firms GBBN, Stanley, Beaman & Sears and Messer Construction Co. have been engaged since June 2015.

“This will be the premier pediatrics care building for children in the state of Kentucky,” said Dr. Gerard Rabalais, chair of the UofL Department of Pediatrics. “This will allow parents easy access to pediatrics specialists and primary care providers in one location, with everything designed specifically for children and their families. It is our intent that through this new facility, we will be building the future of pediatric care for years to come.”

An official groundbreaking ceremony with more details on the overall vision for the building is scheduled for fall.

Researchers from the University of Louisville and James Graham Brown Cancer Center are partners with CHI through national oncological research between the two organizations, as well as locally as part of KentuckyOne Health. This close collaboration has delivered significant impact in the understanding of a variety of cancers and is supporting physicians and patients in Kentucky and across the country.

“These specimens provide our researchers with opportunities to build on existing research initiatives and open the door for new areas of study in fighting cancer,” said Dr. James Ramsey, president of the University of Louisville. “We now will be able to extend our efforts to build upon our advances and we continue to work to reduce the human costs of cancer.”

Research teams in Louisville now have access to triple the number of medical specimens to guide cancer research. The more than 47,000 samples in the University of Louisville biorepository cover 111 unique primary tumor sites and include cancer types that are particularly prevalent in Kentucky, including breast, lung, colon and kidney cancers.

“Cancer is one of the most prevalent health issues facing the people of the Commonwealth,” said Ruth Brinkley, CEO of KentuckyOne Health. “The gifting of these specimens reinforces our shared commitment to bring wellness, health and hope to patients in Kentucky and across the country. The innovative treatments, diagnostic tests and other insights our local researchers are developing are critical to helping us reduce the rate and impact of cancer.”

The specimens arrived at the University of Louisville on May 24, enabling immediate access for research teams.