Olde Hornet
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NIH Awards $375-K Grant | Alabama State University
www.alasu.edu
By Kenneth Mullinax/ASU
Alabama State University’s world-renowned expert on forensic-death studies, Dr. Gulnaz Javan, has received a $375,000 grant from the National Institute of Health (NIH) Support for Research Excellence (SuRE) Program (R16) to help fight the scourge of drug-related deaths by studying microbiomes in deaths caused by cocaine overdose. ASU's Dr. Sheree Finley will work closely with Javan on the three-year grant titled, “Investigating microbiota of the gut-brain axis and the impact of cocaine.”
"Our ASU cocaine/death project begins September 1, and its goal is to determine how microbiome (gut/stomach) composition and its related cocaine overdoses compare with the causes of death in 100 different bodies," said Javan, who is affectionately nicknamed "Dr. Death" by her peers. "We will then build a neural network model that can be used to predict the cause of death based on microbial and metabolic signatures associated with liver and brain tissues. This study will acquire tissues from cadavers (dead human bodies) through collaborations with medical examiners/law enforcement in Montgomery, Alabama and Pensacola, Florida and with an international morgue in Pavia, Italy, which is the largest morgue in Italy."