Integrated Health Sciences Facility Core

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ABSTRACT: INTEGRATED HEALTH SCIENCES FACILITY CORE The Houston-Galveston area is home to over a dozen Superfund sites, and a hub for the petrochemical industry with 500 chemical plants, 10 refineries and >6000 miles of oil, gas and chemical pipelines in what has become the country’s largest energy corridor. The area is also home to the largest medical center in the world, the Texas Medical Center. Thus, both the need and size of the opportunity, for an NIEHS Environmental Health Sciences (EHS) Core Center (EHS-CC) in this region is great. As the EHS-CC for the Texas Medical Center, the Gulf Coast Center for Precision Environmental Health (GC-CPEH) will be the focal point and catalyst for impactful EHS research, bi-directional communication with local communities and stakeholders, and the engine driving translation of precision environmental health research advances to improve human health. The Integrated Health Sciences Facility Core (IHSFC) was developed to provide Center members with support to conduct impactful translational environmental health sciences (EHS) research by leveraging unique resources and community partnerships across the three GC-CPEH parent institutions: Baylor College of Medicine (BCM), UTHealth School of Public Health (UTH-SPH), and University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB). The guiding Vision for the IHSFC is to facilitate forward and reverse translation of members’ research to promote health and reduce susceptibility to environmentally-related adverse health outcomes. The primary Goal is to provide seamless access to expertise and capabilities for translation of GC-CPEH members’ research in the basic sciences into human population studies, and facilitate “reverse translation” of findings from human-population based and clinical studies into new hypothesis-driven laboratory research. To achieve this Goal, the IHSFC will use “Translational Navigators” to connect GC-CPEH Members to IHSFC expertise and services and promote translational environmental health research of the Thematic Focus Areas of the Center: Early Life Genetic and Epigenetic Environment (GE2) Interactions; Disaster Research Response (DR2); and Identification of Mechanisms of, and Interventions for, Human Environmental Disease (MIHED). IHSFC components include: 1) Population Sciences; 2) Clinical Sciences: 3) Exposure Assessment; 4) Biomarkers and 5) Community Engagement. These components are supported by diverse and unique resources across the GC-CPEH, including a Mobile Clinical Research Unit, Environmental Health Service Clinics, Biorepositories, a Biomedical Geospatial Modeling Analytics Facility and Analytical Laboratories for environmental and biomarker assessment.