UConn’s Alcohol Research Center Continues Unprecedented Run (excerpt)
By Christopher DeFrancesco ’95 (CLAS) – UConn Health
June 13, 2019
Despite increasing competition for federal research dollars, the Alcohol Research Center (ARC) at UConn Health endures well into its fifth decade with an unprecedented continuation of funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
A five-year, $7.5 million award from the NIH’s National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) announced this month further extends the program, which was initiated at UConn Health’s Department of Psychiatry in 1978. It’s the eighth successful competitive renewal, continuing funding for years 41 through 45. The program’s longevity is unmatched, both within the University and among all NIAAA-funded alcohol centers.
“You’re absolutely out of your mind,” says Victor Hesselbrock, vice chair of psychiatry and ARC principal investigator, when asked what he would have said if someone told him in 1978 that this new program would last with continuous funding for more than 40 years. “I was thinking at best we would be one and done. It was a new concept coming out of NIAAA.”
At first, the NIAAA awarded grants to nine institutions to establish alcohol research centers. Hesselbrock arrived just months after UConn Health opened the center, which would outlast all of the other original alcohol research centers and become one of the longest-running and most prolific federally funded research centers of any kind in the U.S.
“This is an incredible achievement in federally funded research,” says Dr. Bruce Liang, dean of the UConn School of Medicine. “The Alcohol Research Center’s remarkable longevity not only is a tribute to the scientists led by Dr. Hesselbrock at the UConn School of Medicine, it’s also an affirmation of their many contributions to the medical community’s growing understanding of addiction.”
The grant to establish UConn’s Alcohol Research Center arrived under the leadership of Dr. Roger Meyer, former chair of psychiatry. Posed with the same hypothetical, Meyer said, “Impossible. I could never, ever have said that it would last 40 years.”
Hesselbrock estimates – conservatively, and not adjusted for inflation – that the funding awarded to the Alcohol Research Center totals about $67.5 million, with at least an additional $60 million in spin-off or related educational grants and funding for projects.
“Receiving NIH support for over 40 years is a testament to the ARC’s leadership and its investigators, who had to prove for every five-year funding cycle that they could reinvent the goals of the center to undertake cutting-edge research in alcohol-use disorders,” says Dr. David Steffens, chair of psychiatry since 2012. “Dr. Hesselbrock and his team’s success in this regard is truly remarkable.”
Over its 41 years, the Alcohol Research Center has earned an elite reputation in the worldwide addiction science community. It has broken ground in the areas of neuroscience, medication therapies, behavioral interventions in the treatment of alcohol use disorders, the genetics of addiction, as well as gender, ethnic, and environmental influences on the development of addictive disorders.
“What made us successful,” Hesselbrock says, “and what continues to make us successful, is that we brought in people who were willing to learn, work hard, and were interested in having a productive career.
“Each investigator in our group has really gone out of their way to obtain other grants that are associated with what we do in the center. They’re visible nationally and internationally at scientific meetings and we publish like crazy. At the same time, we have also been very good at working with other colleagues in the field. We are on a number of scientific advisory boards for other addiction centers around the country, hold editorship positions on the major addiction journals, and serve on federal and non-federal study sections in the U.S. and abroad.”
The Grant That Got It Started
The ancestry of UConn’s Alcohol Research Center can be traced back to MacLean Hospital in the Boston area, a psychiatric affiliate of Harvard Medical School. Meyer was leading a multidisciplinary study of opiate addiction when UConn recruited him in January 1977 to lead the Department of Psychiatry.
“John Dempsey Hospital had opened an alcohol treatment center on the third floor,” Meyer says. “When I looked at that, I thought that this would be a fantastic environment in which to conduct research to advance the treatment of patients with alcoholism. Serendipity smiled on us.”
That spring, Meyer learned of plans by the federal government to start funding alcohol research centers and thought UConn would be a good candidate. To shape the grant application, Meyer enlisted the help of a MacLean colleague, Thomas Babor, who had just received a career development award from the NIAAA.
“Tom and I put together the outline of a center grant focusing on clinical alcohol research,” Meyer says. “Mind you, no faculty member in the Department of Psychiatry had any grant-supported research, and no one in the college of medicine had any research experience in alcoholism or drug abuse. While I was certainly experienced in clinical research on opioid and cannabis dependence, alcoholism was new territory for me.”
The original alcohol research grants did not include UConn. But the NIAAA opened a second round of funding and Meyer, with Babor’s help, secured a grant for UConn that would begin a historic run.