Behavioral health nonprofit Centerstone received a $10 million grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to expand teen pregnancy prevention services beyond Tennessee and into Kentucky and Indiana. The programming will serve 60,000 teens in 85 counties with teen birth rates higher than the national average. Additionally, Centerstone Research Institute has secured three grants from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration totaling $4.8 million to support the integration of primary and behavioral health services at locations in Illinois, Indiana and Tennessee.

Vanderbilt has received two recent grants from the NIH’s National Institute on Aging. Vanderbilt University Medical Center has received a $9.4 million grant to test the effectiveness of a transdermal nicotine patch in improving memory loss in older adults with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). About 300 older individuals with MCI will be enrolled in close to 20 sites around the country, including Vanderbilt, in the two-year MIND (Memory Improvement through Nicotine Dosing) study, the largest study of a nicotine patch in non-smokers. Vanderbilt University School of Nursing has been awarded a four-year, $660,633 grant to study how psychophysical responses to acute experimental thermal pain differ between older adults with and without Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). Todd Monroe, PhD, RN, assistant professor of Nursing and the study’s principal investigator, is exploring if older adults with AD have altered responses in sensory pain and affective pain systems that may place them at risk for poor pain management and unnecessary suffering.

The National Institutes of Health also has awarded a four-year, $6 million grant to investigators at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and the University of California at San Francisco to develop an implantable artificial kidney.