Harvard Medical School (HMS) and Boston Children's Hospital together will receive a total of $9 million from the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center (MLSC) to support capital projects, Lieutenant Governor Timothy Murray announced today.
HMS will receive $5 million to create a Laboratory of Systems Pharmacology, an endeavor that will serve as a multidisciplinary scientific incubator for developing new ways to study drugs and diseases in the lab and the clinic. The lab aims to tackle two incredibly important problems—namely, the slowdown in drug discovery in industry and the difficulty of identifying which patients should get which drug—by combining computational analyses and model building with methods such as proteomics, advanced imaging and novel chemistry that together describe the beneficial and toxic effects of drugs with unprecedented precision.
Visiting scientists from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and local drug companies, together with investigators from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Tufts University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, will be involved in this novel effort.
"With receipt of this generous grant from the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center, Harvard is embarking on a bold experiment to rethink the science that guides the development, evaluation and use of new medicines,” said Peter Sorger, director of the Laboratory of Systems Pharmacology and professor of systems biology at Harvard Medical School. “We will gather together the best research scientists and clinicians from Harvard hospitals and sister institutions such as MIT and Tufts and apply advanced experimental and mathematical methods to better understand today's medicines and develop tomorrow's cures.”
The $4 million grant awarded to Boston Children’s Hospital for the Children’s Center for Cell Therapy (CCT) will support new equipment and facility renovation that will create additional cell culture facilities and a robotics area designed to perform highly specialized chemical screening on stem cells. The CCT is a specialized center where researchers are developing novel stem cell therapies for untreatable diseases.
Leonard Zon and George Daley, HMS professor of stem cell and regenerative biology and HMS professor of biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology, respectively, will lead the project at Boston Children’s Hospital.
“We save lives, but all too often we can’t do enough,” said Zon, who directs pioneering research in the Stem Cell Program at Boston Children's Hospital.
“The Center for Cell Therapy will take maximal advantage of exciting new developments in cell biology to translate basic science into cures. We are grateful to have the Commonwealth as our partner in this enterprise,” added Daley, director of the Stem Cell Transplantation Program at the hospital.
The MLSC has also announced grants to Bunker Hill Community College, Quincy College and Regis College for projects related to life sciences training and education.
“Our Administration is committed to investing in innovation across the state, and this grant funding is an example of doing so in partnership with institutions in the Greater Boston area,” said Lieutenant Governor Timothy Murray.
“A key strategy of the Life Sciences Center is to use our capital dollars to enable the creation of unique resources that are available to the Massachusetts life sciences community, and these innovative projects at Children’s and Harvard Medical School are great examples of that,” said Susan Windham-Bannister, president and CEO of the MLSC.
