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NEW DIRECTOR AT WACO VA RESEARCH CENTER HAS BROAD

MISSION -- "We are going to be in the trenches. We are going

to be making sure that what we are finding out in the

laboratory makes it to clinical practice."

Suzy Gulliver, director of the recently established Center of Excellence for Research on Returning War Veterans, sits among her journals stacked on the floor as she awaits shelves to house them. Gulliver is in the process of opening the center at the Waco Veterans Affairs hospital, which will work to develop treatments for various mental health problems. (photo: Nick Simonite / Waco Tribune-Herald)

For more about the Waco VA, use the VA Watchdog search engine...click here...
http://www.yourvabenefits.org/sessearch.php?q=waco&op=and

Story here... http://www.wacotrib.com/news/
content/news/stories/2007/11/01/11012007wacvaresearch.html

Story below: 

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-------------------------

New Waco VA center director has broad research mission

By David Doerr
Tribune-Herald staff writer

Dr. Suzy Gulliver has a daunting job description: build a research center from the ground up that develops treatments for mental health conditions that have plagued soldiers for as long as there have been wars.

The conditions include the so-called “big four” mental health problems afflicting soldiers returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: post-traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injury, depression and substance abuse.

Gulliver, director of the recently established Center of Excellence for Research on Returning War Veterans at the Waco Veterans Affairs Medical Center, said she doesn’t want to be locked into studying just one of those conditions. The center’s broadly defined name reflects her approach of letting the data guide the focus of the researchers who will work there.

“We don’t want to have our center confined to just one part of the elephant,” she said. “We want the whole thing. We want people who work well enough together and have a shared language about what the whole thing is.”

And there is not a moment to lose in getting started, Gulliver said. More than 8,400 soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan have enrolled in the Central Texas Veterans Affairs system, and many of them need mental health treatment, VA officials have said.

“We are facing a dilemma now because we have six years of returning veterans,” Gulliver said. “It is a tremendous opportunity, but it is also a tremendous pressure to not let time to go by because we could potentially miss the most informative period.”

But before she and the researchers who will eventually work there can get to work, she needs offices to house them and shelves to store the hundreds of journals stacked on the floor of her conference room.

Gulliver, who previously worked as a researcher in the Boston VA system, started work in Waco Aug. 20. Since then her schedule has been booked tight with planning meetings to get things off the ground.

The center is housed in temporary work space in a Waco VA building shared by a blind rehabilitation program. But it likely will move into a new space after an expected multimillion-dollar expansion project to modernize the 75-year-old campus is completed.

Her other major tasks include forming partnerships with area educational and medical institutions and finding top researchers to come work at the center. The researchers who will work at the Waco VA primarily will be affiliated with the Texas A&M University Health Science Center.

Gulliver said she hopes to have 10 core faculty members and between 50 and 60 staff members to assist them. Each core researcher is expected to bring active projects with a diversified portfolio of funding sources, including the VA and the National Institutes of Health, she said.

And while researchers will have their own projects to work on, they all will contribute to a central “workhorse study” that is still under development but likely will focus on PTSD.

So far the center is a two-woman operation — Gulliver and administrative assistant Barbie Christian. But Gulliver also consults regularly with Drs. Paul Hicks and Keith Young, two Central Texas VA researchers who have led local efforts to develop mental health projects.

Hicks and Young’s work and the close proximity of Fort Hood, the largest platform for troop deployment in the world, are two reasons the center was designated by Congress to be located at the Waco VA campus. U.S. Rep. Chet Edwards, D-Waco, who has secured $3 million for Young’s study on the root causes of PTSD, also played a role.

Treating veterans now

Having a nationally respected researcher such as Gulliver, commitments for millions of dollars worth of resources and a large pool of subjects to study are all the ingredients needed to make the Waco VA into a nationally prominent research center, Hicks said.

“The Central Texas VA is one that takes care of a relatively larger proportion of people from the (conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan) than the other VAs,” he said. “What that says is we as a group have the opportunity and really the responsibility to make sure these guys are taken care of.”

Young said Gulliver’s qualifications and connections with scientists across the country have taken the Central Texas VA system’s research program into a new league. There have already been several instances in which Gulliver has been able to make a few calls to get fast answers needed to write grant proposals to fund their projects, he said.

One example is the assistance Gulliver gave to Sara Dolan, a Baylor University psychology and neuroscience professor, who has applied for a grant to fund a research project at the Waco VA.

Dolan, who came to work in Waco from Providence, R.I., because of Hicks and Young’s research, said Gulliver was instrumental in helping her with her project, the first sponsored by the center. If the project receives the grant, it could lead to new treatments, she said.

“She has a better understanding of what the hot topics are, and PTSD is a hot topic right now because of the war,” Dolan said. “It turns out that people with PTSD have brain dysfunction that is similar to that found in substance abuse. We decided to throw in a PTSD component to the research that I’m already doing.”

Besides Baylor, Gulliver is exploring partnerships with Texas A&M University’s School of Rural Public Health and the University of Texas’ School of Public Health as well as out-of-state institutions.

Another highlight of the center is a portable $3.5 million magnetic resonance imaging machine to be dedicated for research. The machine will be used to correlate patient’s PTSD symptoms and the effects of treatments with brain activity observed through MRI.

The machine will be housed in a truck that will transport the machine to the Temple VA hospital and Fort Hood to make it more convenient for veterans to use. Gulliver and others believe the machine, one of the first in the world that is portable and dedicated to research, will attract other scientists to work at the center to take advantage of its unique capabilities.

“Our hope is that between the anticipated number of veterans and having these wonderful resources available that we will be able to attract just top-notch science people, not to mention to grow some of our own,” Gulliver said.

No ‘ivory tower’

But research will take time to get started at the Waco VA. The center likely will not “open for business” on research projects until February, and it will likely only be half-staffed after Gulliver’s first year of work. Gulliver said she hopes to be done recruiting by the end of year two.

However, Gulliver said she doesn’t plan on waiting until everyone is in place to begin work.

“To my knowledge there has not been another time in history where we had greater promise because of the resources we have right now,” she said. “We cannot lose that opportunity. We have to really persist through whatever roadblocks come our way.”

But most importantly to Gulliver, the center will not be about doing research for research’s sake, she said. It will be about helping veterans now, not just 30 or 40 years down the road.

“There is a reputation that scientists are hiding out in the ivory tower, and that is just not going to do for this center, Gulliver said. “We are going to be in the trenches. We are going to be making sure that what we are finding out in the laboratory makes it to clinical practice.”

She added, “I don’t hold much respect for people that hide out from the real clinical issues of the day. That is just not the way I do things.”

Rep. Edwards, who chairs the subcommittee over VA spending in the U.S. House, said his dream is for Gulliver to make the center into a nationally respected institution that develops treatments that can be used to treat veterans across the country. He said he intends to do everything in his power to make sure Gulliver has the resources to make that a reality.

“This is an opportunity to provide better care and to research for the future what medical services work best for our troops,” he said. “We’re on the dawn of a new day when it comes to research at the Waco VA.”

ddoerr@wacotrib.com
757-5755

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Larry Scott  --

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