About

About the Center for Botanical Lipids

Wake Forest University Health Sciences has established the Center for Botanical Lipids. This central objective for this new research Center is to determine the role of fatty acid based dietary supplements in the prevention and treatment of chronic human diseases associated with inflammation. This will include investigations into the molecular mechanisms of action, the safety, and the efficacy of Botanical Lipid dietary supplements. Nearly 20% of Americans use dietary supplements, many of them botanicals, but scientific evidence for their safe and effective use in the prevention or treatment of human diseases has lagged behind the use of the products.

This new research initiative is funded by grants from the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) and the Office of Dietary Supplements (ODS), which are components of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The Wake Forest Center for Botanical Lipids is one of five such dietary supplement research centers funded through the NIH (see News and Announcements). The focus of these centers is to conduct research to establish evidence regarding the safety, effectiveness, and mechanisms of action of botanicals. Each Center specializes on a different set of botanicals and human diseases.

The Center for Botanical Lipids will utilize state of the art biochemical and clinical testing to determine the mechanism(s) of action of several promising lipid-based botanicals. The goal of this research is to identify potential new fatty acid based strategies to prevent or treat human diseases with inflammatory components. The botanicals under study include flaxseed oil, borage seed oil, and echium seed oil, all sources of specific fatty acids of interest. The Center will carry out four main research projects and operate core support laboratories.

The Wake Forest Center for Botanical Lipids operates on two campuses. The Wake Forest University Health Sciences home for the Center for Botanical Lipids is the new Biotechnology Research Facility 1 (BRF1) in the Piedmont Triad Research Park located in downtown Winston-Salem, NC (..read more). The new building was dedicated May 16, 2006, in a ceremony featuring a keynote address by Dr. Elias A. Zerhouni, Director of the National Institutes of Health, who also spoke at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine Graduation. BRF1 also houses the Lipid Sciences Research Program, a 50-year research effort at the medical school from which the Center for Botanical Lipids has grown. BRF1 is the sixth addition to the Piedmont Triad Research Park, a planned 240-acre Research Campus. The projects of Dr. Floyd (Ski) Chilton, Dr. Larry Rudel and Dr. John Parks are housed in BRF1, bringing together faculty from Departments of Physiology/Pharmacology with the Department of Pathology/Lipid Sciences. The second campus site is at the Brigham and Women's Hospital, a Teaching Affiliate of the Harvard Medical School. That campus is the site of the asthma project lead by Jonathan Arm, M.D, who is a member of the Inflammation and Allergic Disease Research Section of the Division of Rheumatology, Immunology and Allergy at the Brigham and Women's Hospital.