DETROIT – Wayne State University received notice from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences of the National Institutes of Health has renewed a five-year, $7.5 million grant for the Center for Urban Responses to Environmental Stressors. The previous NIH grant for CURES totaled $2.4 million for three years.

CURES — one of 22 P30 Core Centers funded by NIEHS — is situated in the heart of Detroit, with the goal of understanding the integrated health impacts of environmental exposures to complex chemical and non-chemical contaminants in Detroit’s urban landscape.

CURES is focused on establishing a cleaner and healthier living and working environment in the city of Detroit and throughout the region. “Modern-era” diseases such as cardiovascular disease, cancer and diabetes compromise the quality of life of residents living in an industrialized urban environment such as Detroit and are a consequence of dynamic interactions among an individual’s genetic and epigenetic make-up, nutritional status and environmental stressors, which affect key cellular networks causing disease.

“Our goal is to provide leadership that will identify, evaluate and mitigate environmental health concerns in close collaboration with the community and environmental policy makers,” said Melissa Runge-Morris, M.D., director of CURES and the Institute of Environmental Health Sciences at Wayne State.

“Detroit has an overabundance of industrial and post-industrial environmental toxicants, socioeconomic strains, violence and decay of housing and urban infrastructure, and we have assembled a unique interdisciplinary team of established and new environmental health scientists and community partners to address major environmental health challenges facing Detroit’s racially and ethnically diverse population.”