Dear Members of the HMS Community:
I am pleased to announce the recipients of the 2022 cycle of the Blavatnik Therapeutics Challenge Awards, the Quadrangle Fund for Advancing and Seeding Translational Research (Q-FASTR), the Lyme Research Initiative, and the Foundry Award Program. In addition, I am excited to announce new support for spatial transcriptomics through a collaboration of the preclinical chairs and the Office of the Dean.
Each of these internal awards is designed to provide HMS faculty with funding to pursue innovative research that may often be challenging to support via other funding channels. It is my great pleasure that HMS is able to support these impactful research projects, both through our own internal funds and through the support of generous donors, including the Blavatnik Family Foundation, Phill and Elizabeth Gross, the Fairbairn Family, and the Taplin Funds for Discovery.
Please join me in congratulating these principal investigators across the HMS Quadrangle and HMS-affiliated institutions.
Sincerely,
George Q. Daley
Dean of the Faculty of Medicine
Harvard University
2022 Blavatnik Therapeutics Challenge Awards
β-Carboline GABAA partial-PAMs for essential tremor and related disorders
Kevin Hodgetts (Harvard Medical School/Brigham and Women’s Hospital)
Targeting R-loop and mRNA dependent repair pathway in cancer therapy
Li Lan (Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts General Hospital) and Lee Zou (Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts General Hospital)
Targeted treatment of pemphigus vulgaris
Mohammad Rashidian (Harvard Medical School/Dana Farber Cancer Institute), Ramon Almela (Tufts University), and Erin Wei (Nebraska Medical Center)
2022 Q-FASTR Awards
Antibody-based therapeutics against Nipah virus
Jonathan Abraham (Harvard Medical School)
Evaluating antisense oligos for therapeutic impact in liver fibrosis and hepatocellular carcinoma
Karen Adelman (Harvard Medical School) and Alan Mullen (UMass Chan School of Medicine)
Brain-penetrant kinase inhibitors targeting Alzheimer's and related dementias
Mark Albers (HMS Laboratory of Systems Pharmacology and Massachusetts General Hospital)
Agents modulating B cell activation through the CD81-CD19 co-receptor complex
Stephen Blacklow (Harvard Medical School) and Andrew Kruse (Harvard Medical School)
Developing novel agonists of cytokine receptors by targeting receptor pre-clusters
James Chou (Harvard Medical School)
Methods and applications of semi-permeable capsules with current application to high-throughput single cell multi-omics
Allon Klein (Harvard Medical School)
A kinase inhibitor for malignant brain tumors
Timothy Mitchison (Harvard Medical School)
Identification of druggable targets against Vibrio pathogens
Norbert Perrimon (Harvard Medical School) and John Mekalanos (Harvard Medical School)
Manipulating mitobiogenesis by targeting ME2
David Scadden (Harvard Medical School)
2022 Dean’s Lyme Research Award
Establishing B. burgdorferi reverse genetics in the mouse neuroborreliosis model
Jacob Lemieux (Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts General Hospital) and John Leong (Tufts University)
2022 Fairbairn Family Lyme Research Initiative Awards
Human tick resistance at the tick-host interface
Phyllis Kanki (Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health) and Sam Telford (Tufts University)
Identification of T cell antigens presented during infection of mice with Borrelia burgdorferi
Michael Starnbach (Harvard Medical School) and Linden Hu (Tufts University)
2022 Foundry Awards
Refeyn TwoMP mass photometry instrument for the Center for Macromolecular Interactions
Kelly Arnett (Harvard Medical School)
Functional ultrasound imaging for whole brain activity mapping
Sandeep Robert Datta (Harvard Medical School)
Mouse Behavior Core equipment expansion to offer enhanced phenotyping with capacity for simultaneous in vivo brain circuit measurements and manipulations
Susan Dymecki (Harvard Medical School) and Barbara Caldarone (Harvard Medical School)
Purchase of a Bruker SampleJet NMR Sample Changer for the NEO 600HMz NMR System in the Bio-NMR Facility
Gregory Heffron (Harvard Medical School)
Gnotobiotic Core Facility
Jun Huh (Harvard Medical School) and Dennis Kasper (Harvard Medical School)
Providing ongoing support for the Research Instrumentation Core Facility at Harvard Medical School
Ofer Mazor (Harvard Medical School)
Flow Cytometry Core capacity expansion
Jeffery Nelson (Harvard Medical School) and Christophe Benoist (Harvard Medical School)
Confocal microscopy solution for the Neurobiology Imaging Facility
Michelle Ocana (Harvard Medical School)
Liquid handling automation for arrayed screening in arthropod cells at the Drosophila RNAi Screening Center
Norbert Perrimon (Harvard Medical School) and Stephanie Mohr (Harvard Medical School)
Next Generation Sequencing Core Facility laboratory information management system evaluation project
Robert Steen (Harvard Medical School)
Cellenics: A single-cell data analysis platform to support the Harvard Medical School community
Dana Vuzman (Harvard Medical School)
Next generation peripherals for Nikon Imaging Center spinning disk confocals
Jennifer Waters (Harvard Medical School)
2022 Taplin Fund/Foundry Award
Spatial transcriptomics technology implementation in the HMS Single Cell Core facility
Allon Klein (Harvard Medical School) and Jeffrey Moffit (Harvard Medical School/Boston Children’s Hospital)