PRESS RELEASES   Grant will help 'molecular medicine' 12/18/2007 By Jim Stafford, Business Writer, The Oklahoman Tue December 18, 2007 With support from the Presbyterian Health Foundation, a "rising research star" from the National Institutes of Health will bring ground-breaking research into antioxidant medications to the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation early next year, officials said. Dario Ramirez, 37, a research fellow at the National Institutes of Environmental Health Studies, will bring his research and a $750,000 federal research grant to an OMRF lab by February or March, said Dr. Stephen Prescott, foundation president. The $500,000 grant awarded by the Presbyterian foundation will help underwrite setting up a laboratory in which Ramirez will conduct his research for OMRF, Prescott said. "He uses expensive instruments in this process, and we will have to buy some very expensive instrumentation to get his laboratory started,” Prescott said. "He will need technical assistance in his laboratory and research training.” Ramirez earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry and an M.S. in immunology and did five years of post-doctoral training in the area of oxidative stress and inflammation. His research focuses on environmental stressors of chronic inflammation, particularly in the lungs, Prescott said. "He made a remarkable discovery as a trainee,” Prescott said. "He's invented a technique that lets us assess the damage that oxygen does to the body. It can measure the changes in proteins and DNA in a living system that shows whether you had the intended action.” Oxidation is responsible for many medical conditions, especially those involving inflammation, Prescott said. Ramirez will join the free radical biology group at OMRF. In a letter in support of the grant to Michael Anderson, foundation president, Prescott said that he expects Ramirez to collaborate with many of his fellow Oklahoma scientists in research projects. "Dr. Ramirez will be poised to collaborate with — and make major contributions to — the work of many established scientists at OMRF and the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center,” Prescott wrote. Anderson described the area in which Ramirez conducts research as "molecular medicine,” a new field of medicine. "Molecular medicine makes available a new era of personalized medicine in which therapies are tailored to patients' individual gene maps,” Anderson said. "Physicians trained in molecular medicine will be able to understand and use gene and cell-based novel therapeutics in treating numerous life-threatening diseases.” The new area of research will benefit the entire community of medical researchers in Oklahoma, Anderson said. "It's going to be a fantastic opportunity for this state, because it will put the medical research community here and its training of docs on a par with some of the great university medical centers where molecular medicine has been established,” he said. "We're hoping this is just the beginning and we have a very major department grow out of this in molecular medicine.”