Can we measure urban air quality in real time? Identify compounds that will attack a newly discovered molecular target in tuberculosis? Use recent advances in wholegenome sequencing to devise new genetic tests for neurological diseases such as Lou Gehrig’s disease?
Sixty-two teams of investigators probing questions like these each received $50,000 in funding for one year in the third round of interdisciplinary pilot grants announced on Oct. 21 by Harvard Catalyst, the Harvard Clinical and Translational Science Center. Since March 2009, 189 projects involving 722 scientists from HMS, its affiliated hospitals and institutes, and other Harvard schools have received these grants, which encourage researchers from diverse backgrounds across the Harvard community to combine their expertise in fresh ways to solve problems of human disease.
The 62 newly funded teams include 247 investigators from 13 Harvard-affiliated academic health care centers; HMS; Harvard’s schools of Dental Medicine, Business, Engineering and Applied Sciences, and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences; and MIT. A panel of 140 reviewers selected their projects from 316 proposals representing more than 1,300 faculty members.
“How do you bring people together to work on tough questions and innovative science?” said Lee Nadler, Harvard Catalyst’s director and the HMS dean for clinical and translational research. “We think it begins right here—by giving small teams of smart individuals from diverse backgrounds and institutions the incentive to work on novel, multidisciplinary projects that have significant potential, but also significant risk, because they are exploratory or outside the box.”
The Pilot Grant Program enables clinical and translational researchers the means to gather the preliminary data they will need to secure larger-scale funding from the federal government, or perhaps a private source. In a stellar illustration of how a small grant can leverage additional funding for a more ambitious study, Loren Walensky, a chemical biologist and HMS assistant professor of pediatrics at Dana- Farber Cancer Institute, used data from a pilot grant study to compete for a Grand Challenge Explorations award of $100,000 from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to combat HIV/AIDS. Walensky’s team applied a stabilized peptide-based technology, initially developed for cancer research and therapeutic development, to HIV vaccination.
“HIV immunology was not my area of expertise,” Walensky said, “but my colleagues and I wanted to pull together different basic science disciplines and see if our chemical biology approach could help tackle this high-stakes vaccine development problem. We put our heads together with Joseph Sodroski, one of the world’s leading experts in HIV biology, and Jeffrey Supko, a clinical pharmacologist with deep expertise, to advance our common goal of making a difference in HIV prevention.” Sodroski is an HMS professor of pathology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Supko an HMS associate professor of medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. Another pilot grant is helping develop new molecular methods for rapidly identifying pathogens in clinical samples. “We had a great idea and the resources and knowledge to work on it, but we needed just enough funding to actually do the experiments,” said Danny Milner, HMS assistant professor of pathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an HSPH assistant professor of immunology and infectious diseases. Milner is collaborating with Daniel Schwartz and Michael Chou in the Department of Genetics at HMS.
All pilot grants aim to advance human health in some way. For example, a group headed by Tobias Ritter, an assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, is investigating a new way of synthesizing tracer agents for positron emission tomography (PET) scanning that circumvents many problems associated with older methods. Ritter is working with MGH’s Thomas Brady, the Laurence Lamson Robbins Professor of Radiology; Umar Mahmood, an associate professor of radiology; and Ji-Quan Wang, an assistant professor of radiology. “It is rare and exciting for a chemist to have the opportunity to do work that could, within a short timespan, have an impact on human health,” Ritter said.
To learn more about the Pilot Grant Program, visit the Harvard Catalyst Pilot Funding page (http://catalyst.harvard.edu/services/pilotfunding/) or contact a Harvard Catalyst Research Navigator (http://catalyst.harvard.edu/services/navigators).
