Dear Members of the HMS Community:
I am pleased to announce the recipients of the Blavatnik Therapeutics Challenge Awards (BTCA), the Foundry Award Program, and the Quadrangle Fund for Advancing and Seeding Translational Research (Q-FASTR) for the 2024-2025 academic year.
These internal awards are intended to provide Harvard Medical School faculty with the necessary funding to pursue innovative translational research and research infrastructure that may be difficult to support through other funding channels. It is a privilege for HMS to support these impactful research projects. We extend our heartfelt gratitude to our generous donors — the Blavatnik Family Foundation, Joseph Deitch, Phill and Elizabeth Gross, the Rosenbloom Family, and the Taplin Family — whose support has made these programs possible.
Please join me in congratulating the BTCA, Q-FASTR, and Foundry principal investigator awardees from across the HMS Quadrangle and HMS-affiliated institutions.
Sincerely,
George Q. Daley
Dean of the Faculty of Medicine
Harvard University
2024 Blavatnik Therapeutics Challenge Awards
Treating Fragile X syndrome via cytosine-guanine-guanine repeat contraction
Jeannie Lee (Massachusetts General Hospital)
Preparation of intravenous oxygen for a first-in-human clinical trial
John Kheir (Boston Children’s Hospital) and Yifeng Peng (Boston Children’s Hospital)
Brain selective modulation of adrenergic receptors to treat Parkinson’s Disease
Kevin Hodgetts (Brigham and Women’s Hospital)
2024 Foundry Awards
Flow Cytometry Core capacity expansion
Chad Araneo (Harvard Medical School)
STEDYCON add-on for imaging microbes in the MicRoN Core
Tom Bernhardt (Harvard Medical School)
Upgrading existing instruments and addition of new technological capabilities at the Single Cell Core
Mandovi Chatterjee (Harvard Medical School)
Conventional Electron Microscopy Core Facility microscope replacement
Maria Ericsson (Harvard Medical School)
Update of 400MHz NMR console system in the Bio-NMR Facility
Gregory Heffron (Harvard Medical School)
Expansion of metabolomics and lipidomics capabilities in the Analytical Chemistry Core
Michael James (Harvard Medical School)
Enhancing MicRoN’s efficiency and expanding microscopy capabilities
Paula Montero Llopis (Harvard Medical School)
Super-resolution light microscopy for molecular analysis in situ in the Neurobiology Imaging Facility
Wade Regehr (Harvard Medical School)
Contribution toward purchase of an Illumina NovaSeq X Plus for the BPF Next-Gen Sequencing Core
Robert Steen (Harvard Medical School)
Tunable laser replacement for dual excitation multiphoton microscopy system in the HMS Center for Immune Imaging
Ulrich von Andrian (Harvard Medical School)
2024 Q-FASTR Awards
Targeting cell surface receptors for antisense oligonucleotides delivery to bone marrow leukemia cells
Karen Adelman (Harvard Medical School) and Zuzana Tothova (Dana-Farber Cancer Institute)
Development of allosteric activators for immunotherapy
Stephen Blacklow (Harvard Medical School)
Virome screening for next-generation nucleic acid delivery vectors to the lung
George Church (Harvard Medical School)
Development of small molecule inhibitors of a gut bacterial metabolic toxin
Sloan Devlin (Harvard Medical School)
Structure-based discovery of chromatin remodeling inhibitors
Lucas Farnung (Harvard Medical School)
Developing a novel screening platform to discover inflammasome modulating compounds
Wade Harper (Harvard Medical School)
Oral pan-coronavirus anti-viral
Timothy Mitchison (Harvard Medical School)
Developing a biomarker of homologous recombination deficiency for enhanced poly-ADP ribose polymerase inhibitor efficacy across cancers
Peter Park (Harvard Medical School) and Doga Gulhan (Massachusetts General Hospital)
Investigating the mode of action of a highly selective insecticide and suitability for anopheles management
Norbert Perrimon (Harvard Medical School)
Targeting cancers by de-repressing nuclear dehydrogenase complex
David Scadden (Harvard Medical School)
Developing a synthetic biology platform for pharmaceutical biomanufacturing
Pamela Silver (Harvard Medical School)
In vivo gene editing to treat inherited Collagen VI-related myopathies
Amy Wagers (Harvard Medical School)
In vivo strategy to induce tolerance to therapeutic proteins and autoantigens
Amy Wagers (Harvard Medical School)