“Gray matter no more. Just in time for Halloween, these neurons from a mouse’s hippocampus have gotten a garish new look. Using genetic engineering, researchers inserted into mice as many as four genes encoding fluorescent proteins. Neurons randomly expressed various combinations and levels of the proteins to turn themselves any of approximately 90 colors, the team reports online 31 October in Nature. The researchers say their new “brainbow” technology will be useful for mapping out neural circuits in healthy and diseased brains. (Photo: Jean Livet et al., Nature (2007))”
“….Scientists at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine are mapping parts of the lethal bacteria in three dimensions, exposing a new and intimate chemical portrait of the biological killer down to its very atoms. This view of the disease will offer scientists who design drugs a fresh opening into the bacteria’s vulnerabilities, and thus enable them to create drugs to disable it or vaccines to prevent it.
Anthrax is just the beginning. The Feinberg School is directing an ambitious national project that will map a rogues’ gallery of 375 proteins from deadly infectious diseases over the next five years. It is being funded by a $31 million contract from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health. The payoff could be a wave of new medicines to wipe out some of the worst scourges to ever infect the human race. “
“ScienceDaily (Oct. 31, 2007) — Researchers at the Saint Louis University School of Medicine have discovered the key brain chemical that causes Parkinson’s disease – a breakthrough finding that could pave the way for new, far more effective therapies to treat one of the most common and debilitating neurological disorders. “
“In the process that leads to Parkinson’s disease, dopamine is converted into a highly toxic chemical called DOPAL. Using test-tube, cell-culture and animal models, the researchers found that it is DOPAL that causes alpha-synuclein protein in the brain to clump together, which in turn triggers the death of dopamine-producing cells and leads to Parkinson’s.
“This is very exciting,” Burke said. “This is the first time that anyone has ever established that it is a naturally occurring byproduct of dopamine that causes alpha-synuclein to aggregate, or clump together. It’s actually DOPAL that kicks this whole process off and results in Parkinson’s disease.”
The research was supported by grants from the Missouri ADRDA Program, the Nestle Foundation, the St. Louis Veterans Administration Medical Center, the National Institutes of Health, the American Federation on Aging Research, the Alan A. and Edith L. Wolff Charitable Trust and the Blue Gator Foundation.
The scientists’ findings are published in an early online edition of the journal Acta Neuropathologica.”
Interesting article in the NYC on the Pupin Physics Laboratories at Columbia which housed early atom experiments. A plaque there proclaims it a Registered National Historic Landmark, but there is no mention of ties to the bomb.
In “The Manhattan Project” (Black Dog & Leventhal), published last month, Dr. Norris writes about the Manhattan Project’s Manhattan locations. He says the borough had at least 10 sites, all but one still standing. They include warehouses that held uranium, laboratories that split the atom, and the project’s first headquarters — a skyscraper hidden in plain sight right across from City Hall.
Lisa Feldman Barrett, Ph.D., Boston College professor of psychology, who will study how the brain creates emotional experiences like anger and happiness.
Peter Bearman, Ph.D., Columbia University professor of social science, who will study the role of social and environmental factors in autism.
Emery N. Brown, M.D., Ph.D., Massachusetts General Hospital professor of anesthesia and Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor of computational neuroscience and health sciences and technology, who will develop a systems neuroscience approach to study how anesthetic drugs act in the brain to create the state of general anesthesia.
Thomas R. Clandinin, Ph.D., Stanford University assistant professor of neurobiology, who will pursue a genetics-based approach to understanding how the brain computes.
James J. Collins, Ph.D., Boston University professor of biomedical engineering, who will develop systems biology and synthetic biology approaches to analyze the bacterial gene regulatory networks underlying cellular responses to antibiotics.
Margaret Gardel, Ph.D., University of Chicago assistant professor of physics, who will establish new frameworks to study the physical behaviors of systems of multiprotein complexes.
Takao K. Hensch, Ph.D., Children’s Hospital Boston professor of neurology, who will explore the role of noncoding RNAs in brain development and as a potential treatment for brain disorders.
Marshall S. Horwitz, M.D., Ph.D., University of Washington School of Medicine professor of medicine, pathology, and genome sciences, who will track mutations to map the fate of cells during embryonic development.
Rustem F. Ismagilov, Ph.D., University of Chicago associate professor of chemistry, who will develop and validate microfluidic technologies for quantitative studies of protein aggregation and aging.
Frances E. Jensen, M.D., Children’s Hospital Boston professor of neurology, who will examine how seizures in early life alter the developing brain and lead to cognitive disorders.
Mark J. Schnitzer, Ph.D., Stanford University assistant professor of biological sciences and applied physics, who will create technology for massively parallel brain imaging to allow large-scale, systematic studies of normal and diseased neural circuits.
Gina Turrigiano, Ph.D., Brandeis University professor of biology, who will develop a very high-resolution microscope for probing the molecular structure of synapses.
2007 NIH Director’s New Innovator Award Recipients
Kjersti Aagaard-Tillery, M.D., Ph.D., Baylor College of Medicine assistant professor of maternal-fetal medicine, who will study how maternal obesity programs genetic modifications and adaptations in the developing fetus that predispose it to adult diseases.
Ryan C. Bailey, Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign assistant professor of chemistry, who will develop an ultrasensitive measurement technology to provide a picture of disease onset and progression at the molecular level.
Ed Boyden, Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology assistant professor of biological engineering, who will invent and study new methods of controlling the neural circuits that malfunction in neurological and psychiatric disorders.
Frances A. Champagne, Ph.D., Columbia University assistant professor of neurobiology and behavior, who will investigate the transmission of reproductive behavior across generations through genetic modifications that do not involve DNA sequence changes.
Sean Davies, Ph.D., Vanderbilt University research assistant professor of pharmacology, who will develop genetically engineered bacteria that could be used as dietary supplements for the long-lasting drug treatment of chronic diseases.
Pedro Fernandez-Funez, Ph.D., University of Texas Medical Branch assistant professor of neurology, who will use fruit flies and mice to study the biology of prion proteins, which cause neurodegenerative disorders such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob and mad cow diseases.
Sarah Fortune, M.D., Harvard School of Public Health assistant professor of immunology and infectious diseases, who will investigate the mechanisms by which tuberculosis escapes the immune system response.
Levi A. Garraway, M.D., Ph.D., Dana-Farber Cancer Institute assistant professor of medicine, who will use a novel genetic and chemical screening approach to identify changes in malignant melanoma tumor cells that could be targets for new treatments.
Tawanda Gumbo, M.D., University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas assistant professor of internal medicine, who will develop a treatment regimen based on blocking the mechanisms that tuberculosis bacteria use to evade killing by antibiotics.
Nir Hacohen, Ph.D., Massachusetts General Hospital assistant professor of medicine, who will use a new genetic approach to dissect immune system pathways that sense disease-causing agents.
Ekaterina Heldwein, Ph.D., Tufts University School of Medicine assistant professor of microbiology and molecular biology, who will use structural and biophysical approaches to discover, in atomic-level detail, how herpes viruses enter their host cells.
Konrad Hochedlinger, Ph.D., Harvard Stem Cell Institute assistant professor of medicine, who will study the reprogramming of adult mouse and human cells into embryonic cells by defined factors.
Kristen C. Jacobson, Ph.D., University of Chicago assistant professor of psychiatry, who will conduct a large, multiphase, multidisciplinary study of Chicago-area adolescents to determine the effects of social, biological, and environmental factors on individual differences in problem behaviors.
Joanna L. Jankowsky, Ph.D., California Institute of Technology senior research fellow in biology, who will develop a mouse model to study the function of unique brain cells that are regenerated throughout life and explore how their loss may contribute to Alzheimer’s disease.
Alan Jasanoff, Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology N.C. Rasmussen Assistant Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering, who will devise genetically controlled, noninvasive methods for measuring brain activity in animals.
Mark D. Johnson, M.D., Ph.D., Brigham and Women’s Hospital assistant professor of neurosurgery, who will examine the role of decreased synthesis of microRNA, a recently discovered class of molecules, in the development and aggressiveness of human cancer.
Manuel Llinas, Ph.D., Princeton University assistant professor of molecular biology and genomics, who will define how metabolic pathways in the malaria-causing organism interact with human cell pathways, as a means of discovering new targets for treatment.
Feroz R. Papa, M.D., Ph.D., University of California, San Francisco assistant professor of medicine, who will develop new therapies for diabetes using molecular tools to prevent protein aggregation in insulin-producing beta cells of the pancreas.
Dana Pe’er, Ph.D., Columbia University assistant professor of biological sciences, who will use computational and biotechnology approaches to understand how a cell’s regulatory network processes signals and how the signal processing goes wrong in cancer.
Kathrin Plath, Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles, assistant professor of biological chemistry, who will study structural changes in chromosomes that underlie the development and differentiation of cells.
Michael Rape, Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, assistant professor of cell and developmental biology, who will develop an integrated set of approaches to study differences in the regulation of cell division in specific tissues.
Jody Rosenblatt, Ph.D., Huntsman Cancer Institute assistant professor of oncological sciences, who will identify signals governing the process by which dying cells are squeezed out of tissues and study the role of this process in normal cellular function as well as in tumor formation and spread.
Alan Saghatelian, Ph.D., Harvard University assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology, who will develop advanced analytical chemistry approaches to characterize biomedically important enzymes.
James Shorter, Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine assistant professor of biochemistry and biophysics, who will develop biochemical methods to combat diseases caused by nerve degeneration, such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and Huntington’s.
Dorothy A. Sipkins, M.D., Ph.D., University of Chicago assistant professor of medicine, who will use live-cell imaging and targeted nanoparticles to study stem cell and tumor microenvironments in the bone marrow.
Eva M. Szigethy, M.D., Ph.D., Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC assistant professor of psychiatry and pediatrics, who will use inflammatory bowel disease as a model for investigating the interactions between the brain, gut, and immune system in how adolescents cope with chronic illness.
Derek Toomre, Ph.D., Yale University assistant professor of cell biology, who will develop novel microscopes to analyze trafficking and signaling at the cell cortex, a structure just inside the cell membrane that is involved in mechanical support and movement.
Jing Yang, Ph.D., University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine assistant professor of pharmacology and pediatrics, who will study how cancer cells spread to other organs, which could improve the ability to make prognoses and reveal new drug targets.
Mehmet Fatih Yanik, Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science, who will develop microchip technologies to perform extremely fast studies of gene function in small animals to rapidly identify genetic targets for new drugs.
Note: After this news release was issued, NIH made an additional New Innovator Award to David A. Spiegel, M.D., Ph.D., Yale University assistant professor of chemistry, who will develop small molecules that direct human immune system antibodies to attack disease-causing cell types, with potential applications in the treatment of cancer and HIV infection.
Note: On September 20, 2007, the work description for Feroz R. Papa, M.D., Ph.D., University of California, San Francisco was updated for accuracy at the request of the award receipient.
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The Department of Health and Human Services is the Grants.gov program’s managing partner, and allows access to the 26 federal grant-making agencies available through this convenient E-Government initiative. Below are the links to those agency websites. If you would like to learn more about grants specific to these agencies, please click here.
NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni, M.D., is making a major investment in the future of science with five-year grants totaling more than $105 million to 41 exceptionally innovative investigators, many of whom are in the early stages of their careers.“Novel ideas and new investigators are essential ingredients for scientific progress, and the creative scientists we recognize with NIH Director’s Pioneer Awards and NIH Director’s New Innovator Awards are well-positioned to make significant — and potentially transformative — discoveries in a variety of areas,” said Zerhouni.
NIH roadmap: What is it?
The NIH Roadmap is an integrated vision to deepen our understanding of biology, stimulate interdisciplinary research teams, and reshape clinical research to accelerate medical discovery and improve people’s health. Most of the initiatives began in FY 2004. Other initiatives started in FY 2005 and beyond, depending upon the budget and other emerging needs.
NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni, M.D., is making a major investment in the future of science with five-year grants totaling more than $105 million to 41 exceptionally innovative investigators, many of whom are in the early stages of their careers.
The scale and complexity of today’s biomedical research problems increasingly demands that scientists move beyond the confines of their own discipline and explore new organizational models for team science. For example, imaging research often requires radiologists, physicists, cell biologists, and computer programmers to work together in integrated teams. Many scientists will continue to pursue individual research projects; however, they will be encouraged to make changes in the way they approach the scientific enterprise. NIH wants to stimulate new ways of combining skills and disciplines in both the physical and biological sciences. The Director’s Pioneer Award will encourage investigators to take on creative, unexplored avenues of research that carry a relatively high potential for failure, but also possess a greater chance for truly groundbreaking discoveries. In addition, novel partnerships, such as those between the public and private sectors, will be encouraged to accelerate the movement of scientific discoveries from the bench to the bedside.
As part of its theme, Research Teams of the Future, the NIH Roadmap seeks to encourage scientists and scientific institutions to test alternative models for conducting research. The implementation groups in this area are:
Taken together, the components of these initiatives are part of a carefully considered national portfolio of research to meet the health demands of the 21st century.
Refer to NIH Roadmap Web site at nihroadmap.nih.gov and further information about NIH can be found at its Web site: www.nih.gov.
New Roadmap Emphasis Areas for 2008
Possible Topics for Major Roadmap Initiatives
Microbiome:
The Microbiome is the full collection of microbes (bacteria, fungi, viruses, etc.) that naturally exist within the human body. Initiatives in this area would focus on developing a deeper understanding of these communities of microbes in order to determine how they affect human health.
Protein Capture/Proteome Tools:
The Proteome is the complete set of proteins in the body. Efforts in this area would support developing and making available to the scientific community high quality probes specific to every protein in the human and in desired animal models. This would allow the ability to characterize protein function in health and disease and to monitor the markers of a disease in order to deploy early prevention efforts and to identify potential therapeutic targets.
Phenotyping Services and Tools
A human Phenotype is the total physical appearance and constitution of a person, often determined by multiple genes and influenced by environmental interactions. Initiatives in this area would encourage the development of resources to systematically catalog human phenotypes in an effort to characterize complex diseases and disorders. Inflamation as a Common Mechanism of Disease
While significant breakthroughs have occurred in our understanding of inflammation, research is needed to further understand inflammatory processes. Because inflammation is broadly implicated in many diseases and conditions, this initiative would be valuable in uncovering as-yet-unknown immune mechanisms and mediators of inflammation as well as genetic factors, environmental triggers, and the relationship of inflammation to disease. Epigenetics
Epigenetics is the study of stable genetic modifications that result in changes in gene expression and function without a corresponding alteration in DNA sequence. The epigenome is a catalog of the epigenetic modifications that occur in the genome. Epigenetic changes have been associated with disease, but further progress requires the development of better methods to detect the modifications and a clearer understanding of factors that drive these changes.
Genetic Connectivity Map
The Connectivity Map is an effort to discover and demonstrate the linkages between diseases, drug candidates, and genetic manipulation.
Transient Molecular Complexes:
Transient Molecular Complexes are temporary molecular complexes that are continuously created and destroyed within our cells. Our current level of understanding of cellular biology and the complex interactions that lead to the development and progression of diseases is primarily based upon easily characterized static models (which do not include transient complexes). Understanding interactions within transient complexes is essential for robust modeling that can accurately describe how diseases develop and progress. Regenerative Medicine:
Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine involves the engineering of healthy, functional tissues/organs in vitro for implantation and the remodeling or regeneration of tissue in vivo to repair, replace, preserve, or enhance tissue/organ function.
Pharmacogenomics:
Pharmacogenomics applies the power of genomics to the prediction of individual responses to medication. By determining the variations in the human genome that predict likelihood of response (or susceptibility to adverse effects), the type and dose of medication can be adapted to each person’s unique genetic makeup, thereby assuring greater efficacy and greater safety of treatment.
Bioinformatics:
Bioinformatics applies principles of information sciences and technologies to make the vast, diverse, and complex life sciences data more understandable and useful.
NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni, M.D., is making a major investment in the future of science with five-year grants totaling more than $105 million to 41 exceptionally innovative investigators, many of whom are in the early stages of their careers.“Novel ideas and new investigators are essential ingredients for scientific progress, and the creative scientists we recognize with NIH Director’s Pioneer Awards and NIH Director’s New Innovator Awards are well-positioned to make significant — and potentially transformative — discoveries in a variety of areas,” said Zerhouni.“The conceptual and technological breakthroughs that are likely to emerge from their highly innovative approaches to major research challenges could speed progress toward important medical advances,” he added.This is the first group of New Innovator Awards and the fourth group of Pioneer Awards. Both programs are part of an NIH Roadmap for Medical Research initiative that tests new approaches to supporting research.Pioneer Awards support scientists at any career stage, while New Innovator Awards are reserved for new investigators who have not received an NIH regular research (R01) or similar grant.“These awards complement our other special efforts to fund innovative research and support new scientists as they launch their research careers,” Zerhouni noted.Zerhouni will announce the 2007 award recipients at the start of the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award Symposium on Wednesday, September 19. The symposium, in the Natcher Conference Center on the NIH campus, runs from 8:15 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. and is free and open to the public. The event also features research progress reports from the 2006 Pioneer Award recipients and poster presentations by a number of the past awardees.The 12 new Pioneer Award recipients will each receive $2.5 million in direct costs over five years. The 29 New Innovator Award recipients will each receive $1.5 million in direct costs over the same period.Link: http://www.nih.gov/news/pr/sep2007/od-18a.htm
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