UC Davis to help expand influenza research program - Partner in $18.5 M National Research Center

Sacramento Business Journal - A research program - Sacramento Business Journal:pril 3, 2007
http://sacramento.bizjournals.com/sacramento/stories/2007/04/02/daily14.html

UC Davis to help expand influenza research program

Sacramento Business Journal - 1:53 PM PDT Tuesday, April 3, 2007
by Kathy Robertson
Staff writer

The University of California Davis will partner with University of California Los Angeles on a new, $18.5 million national research center that will study pandemic flu viruses, including bird flu.

The Center for Rapid Influenza Surveillance and Research at UCLA is one of six new centers announced by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, an arm of the National Institutes of Health.

The new center's overall objective is to expand the federal government's early-detection program for influenza, to help it reduce the chances of a deadly influenza outbreak around the world, and to reduce the effects of common, seasonal strains of flu.

Walter Boyce, a research veterinarian and director of the UC Davis Wildlife Health Center, will lead the UC Davis branch of the center. Boyce and Scott Layne of UCLA, a public health physician and professor at UCLA's School of Public Health, have been named co-directors and co-principal investigators of the new center.

"UC Davis and UCLA have joined together to tackle one of the most important public health threats of our time," Boyce said Tuesday in a press release.

UC Davis' chief role in the new surveillance and research center will be to coordinate the collection and testing of tens of thousands of samples from wildlife, especially wild birds, on both the U.S., and Asian sides of the Pacific Ocean.