UCSD Superfund Research Center

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UCSD Superfund Research Center

A NIH/NIEHS federally funded Research Center at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) focus Official page of the UCSD Superfund Research Center.
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The UCSD Superfund Research Center’s (UCSD-SRC) objective is to generate new perspectives on the molecular and genetic basis of the biological effects of toxicant exposure, leading to new methodologies for gauging health risks and assessing health effects; innovative detection and monitoring systems for toxicity; and novel models for bioremediation. In short, we study the "Detection and Models of

Toxicant Exposure". The UCSD-SRC is a multidisciplinary effort consists of 5 biomedical research projects, 2 non-biomedical research projects, 2 research support cores and Research Translation and Community Engagement cores. The research is supported in part by a Ph.D. training program. We are testing the hypothesis that “Alterations in biological response by Superfund site chemicals can be exploited to develop models for the detection and bioremediation of chemical toxicants”. Our findings have shown that chemical exposure leads to alterations in patterns of gene expression which are controlled and regulated by underlying signal transduction pathways.

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San Diego, CA
92093

Website

http://superfund.ucsd.edu/

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Our Story

Welcome to the Official page of the UCSD Superfund Research Center

About Us

The UCSD Superfund Research Center works to understand how toxicants do their damage. A toxicant is a poison that is made by humans or that is put into the environment by human activities. A toxicant is not a toxin, which is a poison made by certain bacteria, plants, or animals, including insects. We hope our research will lead to new ways to assess health effects, detect and monitor sites, and reduce risks from Superfund sites.

Our Center

The UCSD-SRC is a multidisciplinary effort consisting of four Biomedical and two Environmental Science and Engineering Projects, all of which will use the highly specialized core resources of our Genetics and Metabolomics Research Support Core. Along with our Training Core which will provide career support to graduate and postdoctoral level trainees, the research and core components of our Center will work with the Research Translation Core (RTC) to promote our findings to broader based audiences, and the Community Engagement Core (CEC) to share our expertise with impacted communities.

Our Research

We will be investigating toxicants originating from industrial and consumer sources that lead to toxicant-induced steatohepatitis (TASH) and cancer. TASH is an escalating problem in many susceptible Hispanic and American Indian communities that are exposed to household, occupational and industrial chemical exposure. Our efforts will provide important findings linking mechanisms of TASH and cancer with disease prognosis, which can be communicated to impacted communities to serve as intervention tools to assist in prevention of toxicant exposure.

Overall, the central focus of our Center is to examine:

“The mechanisms leading to toxicant-induced steatohepatitis (TASH) are a combination of poor nutrition, health disparities and ongoing environmental toxicant exposure.”

Our Funding

The research conducted by our Center is supported by Grant Number P42 ES010337 from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences or the National Institutes of Health.