DURHAM – With a $16.3 million grant from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, researchers at North Carolina Central University hope to not just identify health disparities, but take the first step toward solving them.

The grant to NCCU’s Julius L. Chambers Biomedical/Biotechnology Research Institute (BBRI) will focus on three main projects, Dr. Deepak Kumar, BBRI’s director, says in the accompanying video:

• How obesity-related factors affect breast cancer in African-American women;
• How perceptions of discrimination affect kidney disease in African-Americans;
• How alcohol affects cardiovascular health differently in African-American men and women.

“The first step is to identify the health disparities, of course, and to see where the problem is,” Kumar says.  “But in the process, we hope that we will be able to make a dent in the problem.

“If we identify a specific molecule which is important to health-disparity related disease, then we have done the first step.  We have identified the target that BRITE or any other entity can target,” he says.

“So the whole idea is that we identify the problem, and then we take it to the next step and address it.”