University of Arizona researchers used to conduct sleep studies in a leased facility located above a Tucson bar and grill. Now they conduct their research in a top-of-the-line facility.
Built using a $5 million construction grant from the National Institutes of Health Office of the Director, the UArizona Health Sciences Center for Sleep, Circadian and Neuroscience Research gives investigators access to state-of-the-art technology to conduct innovative sleep and circadian rhythm research.
The new facility, located in the basement of the Arizona Health Sciences Center building at 1501 N. Campbell Avenue, offers a highly controlled environment aimed at enhancing human research involving sleep and circadian rhythms to improve understanding of disease processes involving multiple biological systems.
“Our center is one of a kind,” said Sairam Parthasarathy, MD, director of the Center for Sleep, Circadian and Neuroscience Research and chief of the Division of Pulmonary, Allergy, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine in the Department of Medicine at the UArizona College of Medicine – Tucson. “The ability to control, manipulate and measure the temperature, lighting intensity and timing, and inhaled gases, and collect blood samples and administer intravenous medications remotely in one single facility is, to our knowledge, not feasible in any other sleep-circadian research center in the U.S.”
The state-of-the-art facility allows for continuous monitoring of the environment of each room using sensors for light, noise, inhaled gases, and room, core body and skin temperatures that will be collected and recorded in a time synchronous manner with the sleep and circadian rhythms in computerized software. The facility enables sophisticated short- and long-term experimentation that could simulate conditions in the International Space Station or future space missions.
“I am most excited about the new scientific questions we can explore with a facility such as this,” said the center’s associate director Michael Grandner, PhD, MTR, CBSM, FAASM, associate professor and director of the Sleep and Health Research Program in the College of Medicine – Tucson’s Department of Psychiatry, and a member of the BIO5 Institute. “We already have projects planned that have the potential to answer questions about how sleep contributes to heart health, why our brains crave unhealthy foods in the middle of the night, how the rhythms of suicide can teach us how to prevent it, how we can use wearables to improve population sleep health, and how we can use neuroscience to reduce racial and ethnic sleep disparities.”
William D. “Scott” Killgore, PhD, a member of the executive committee for the new center and a professor of psychiatry in the College of Medicine – Tucson, said the new center will greatly increase the university’s impact in the field of sleep and circadian science.
“The monitoring capabilities of the new center are light years ahead of where we were in the old facility,” said Killgore, director of the Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience Lab and a member of the BIO5 Institute. “It will now be possible to run large multi-person sleep deprivation and circadian shift studies faster than before and to have much greater control over nearly every aspect of the living environment, including the ability to transport participants directly to the research neuroimaging center without having to be exposed to outside light or temperature changes. The center is large enough to accommodate multiple investigators and research teams operating simultaneously, which will dramatically increase the impact of University of Arizona research on the field of sleep and circadian science.”
“The University of Arizona Health Sciences has studied sleep for more than four decades, during which time our researchers have made pioneering advances in understanding the connections between sleep and cardiovascular disease, neurocognition and behavioral interventions,” said Michael D. Dake, MD, senior vice president for the University of Arizona Health Sciences.“The Center for Sleep, Circadian and Neuroscience Research’s new location and facilities will allow us to find new solutions to critical sleep issues, improving health and human potential for all.”
