HMS, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Children’s Hospital Boston, and Harvard University are part of a consortium to receive a $24 million, five-year grant from the Roadmap Initiative of the National Institutes of Health. The project, called “SysCODE: Systems-based Consortium for Organ Design and Engineering,” will be based in the Division of Genetics at BWH and include researchers from HMS, CHB, Harvard, MIT, Boston University, and Vanderbilt University. The research will focus on integrating different scientific disciplines to regenerate critical organ parts from stem cells. Richard Maas, HMS professor of medicine and chief of the BWH Division of Genetics, will lead the program. Approximately three fourths of the consortium’s work will be based at the Medical School and its affiliated hospitals.
The consortium will focus on three organs—the tooth germ, the pancreatic islet, and the heart valve—and be organized into four scientific teams. Douglas Melton of Harvard will lead the developmental genetics team; David Gifford of MIT will head the computational and genome science team; Donald Ingber, the Judah Folkman professor of vascular biology in the Department of Pathology at HMS and CHB, will lead the tissue engineering team; and Jonathan Seidman, the Henrietta B. and Frederick H. Bugher Foundation professor of genetics at HMS, will head the technology development and training team.
The underlying premise of the project is that current genomic and proteomic technologies can be used to capture information on the regulatory networks that are normally used to direct endogenous organ development. Computational approaches can be used to integrate these different datasets into “molecular blueprints” that in turn can be used by tissue engineers to regenerate organ parts from stem cells, much as an electrical engineer might use a circuit diagram to build a radio.
The consortium has also received an interdisciplinary training grant, led by Joseph Bonventre, the Robert H. Ebert professor of medicine and health sciences and technology at HMS and BWH, that will fund eight postdoctoral trainees per year, working at the interfaces among the different scientific disciplines represented by the research teams.
