U vet school gets $55M to study deadly pandemics

The University of Minnesota's School of Veterinary Medicine has been awarded a $55 million federal grant, one of the largest in the university's history, to help stop future pandemic diseases around the globe.

The university announced Friday that it will share in a $185 million, five-year, multicenter grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) that includes Tufts University and DAI, a private international development company based in Washington.

The university's vet school will use the money to take faculty and other U experts to countries where infectious diseases are most likely to emerge. The mission of the new Ecosystem Health program, to be based in the vet school, will be to connect with universities in those parts of the world. U faculty will provide training on how to recognize links between humans and animals, both domestic and wild, that are most likely to produce dangerous new diseases such as SARS, avian flu and HIV.

"We are working with those universities to be ahead of the curve," said Dr. Katey Pelican, a wildlife veterinarian and assistant professor. "We are preparing [them] for the next SARS."

Pelican led the effort to get the grant and will be codirector of the program. Dr. John Deen, an associate professor at the vet school, will be director.

They will teach those at foreign universities how to create bridges between largely separate disciplines such as human and animal medicine or domestic and wild animal research. In turn, those universities can train local governments and communities.

Some of the grant money will go to those partners for staff, expertise and technology for monitoring, coordination and research, Pelican said.

Starting in January, the program will focus primarily on Southeast Asia, the Congo Basin in Africa and the Amazon Basin in South America.

The program, called RESPOND, is the largest piece of a five-part effort by USAID to preempt global disease outbreaks. Experts fear that the risk for new diseases is rising as the world's population expands, global travel accelerates and the destruction of wild ecosystems brings humans and wild animals closer together.

Deen said this is by far the largest grant received by the vet school and one of the largest received by the university. In the past two years, the university has received $40 million from Best Buy founder Richard Schulze for diabetes research, $50 million from the family of Dr. Kurt Amplants for the children's hospital and $65 million for cancer research from the Minnesota Masonic Charities.

Josephine Marcotty • 612-673-7394