CHAPEL HILL -- UNC-Chapel Hill has won $14.5 million in federal stimulus money to expand a rural research center where dogs and hogs will be used to study hemophilia, heart disease and muscular dystrophy.
The money from the National Institutes of Health will fund two new buildings to house animals at the Bingham Facility in westernOrange County. UNC-CH will find an additional $5 million to $8 million from other sources to complete a third new building for research.
The facility, which houses about 85 dogs and was built in the 1970s, has had multiple leaks in its wastewater treatment system. The state is considering a fine for treated wastewater that leaked into Collins Creek, an already polluted tributary of Jordan Lake.
The university is hauling its wastewater to a treatment plant in Chapel Hill while studying new methods of handling waste at the site.
"I think the grant offers the opportunity to do Bingham right," the associate vice chancellor for research, Bob Lowman, said Tuesday. "It allows us to plan for a long-term sustainable operation at minimal impact to the neighborhood."
Chancellor Holden Thorp put Lowman in charge after apologizing to neighbors in rural Bingham Township for the spills.
The NIH money will allow the university to close the 50-year-old Francis Owen Blood Research Laboratory near University Lake in Carrboro. The laboratory, whose researchers will move with their animals to the Bingham Facility, does research on bleeding disorders and high cholesterol linked to heart disease.
The new, expanded campus will also house golden retrievers bred to study Duchenne muscular dystrophy, which affects one in 5,000 male babies. Most patients are in wheelchairs by their teens and die in their 20s, according to lead researcher Joe Kornegay, a veterinarian and professor of pathology.
With dogs now housed in Bingham, in Hillsborough and at the Francis Owen lab, where pigs are also studied, the grant lets UNC-CH consolidate, saving money and time.
"Our vets are spending hours every day driving back and forth between the three facilities," Lowman said. "That's very valuable time."
Putting all the animals and research in one place will also allow the university to centralize its heating and cooling instead of running separate systems for each building on the Bingham campus as it does now, he said.
Excluding this most recent award, UNC-CH researchers have received nearly $110 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act grants or awards since March 2009. About $129 million in total ARRA funding is expected.
"To receive a construction award in such an extremely competitive grant program is an achievement that reflects the extraordinary quality of work by our faculty researchers," said Tony Waldrop, vice chancellor for research and economic development.
"The researchers whose work will be supported by the Bingham Facility are national leaders in discovering new gene therapy for hemophilia, muscular dystrophy and cardiovascular disease," he said in a statement. "They give new hope daily to patients with these diseases."
