NCCAM Announces Six Grants

NCCAM Announces Six Grants

BETHESDA, Md.The NationalCenter for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) announced six newgrant awards designed to expand the initiative it started in 2003. That year,NCCAM funded $18.7 million for 14 projects.This year, NCCAM expanded its scopeby funding three programs in its Centers of Excellence for Research on CAM andthree in the Developmental Centers for Research on CAM.

In the Developmental Centers program, NCCAM announced threegrants and first-year funding. The first, for $777,000, was awarded to the University ofMinnesota, Minneapolis, and Bastyr University, to investigate the impact ofmedicinal mushrooms on the immune systems response to cancer. A second grantwith funding of $840,000 was awarded to four partner institutions in Portland,Ore., to help define and understand placebo effects to help improveclinical trial design and understanding of mind-body medicine. Finally, a grantfor $620,000 was given to the University of North Texas Health Science Centerand Texas College of Osteopathic Medicine, both in Fort Worth, to conductstudies on the effects of osteopathic manipulation on muscles, lymph flow andpain relief. The school will collaborate with the Arizona College of OsteopathicMedicine in Glendale, Ariz.

Three grants and first-year funding were also announced forthe Centers of Excellence. A $1.2 million grant was presented to the OsherCenter for Integrative Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco,to investigate the use of meditation on stress reduction in people with earlystage HIV, in hopes of determining whether meditation can benefit immunefunction and slow disease progression. The second grant, for $1.1 million, wasawarded to McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School in Belmont, Mass., to evaluatewhether Traditional Chinese Medicines (TCM) and acupuncture can prevent relapsein alcoholics and drug addicts. The grant was co-funded by the NationalInstitute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. The third grant, totaling $1.2million, went to the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, to conductclinical research to identify antioxidant CAM therapies for asthma.

Further information on the programs and NCCAM is availableonline (www.nccam.nih.gov).