Among the recent awards to HMS, HSDM and HSPH faculty members through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act were 24 Grand Opportunities (GO) grants to be based at the Quad or an affiliated hospital. The National Institutes of Health announced 376 GO grants nationwide. The one-year funding total of the 24 grants is nearly $40 million, with a second-year total expected to reach a similar level. HMS researchers are also collaborating on other grants in the GO program.

As of Oct. 28, the number of all stimulus grants to the Medical School, including four of the five Quad-based GO grants, stood at 95, worth an anticipated two-year total of more than $75 million. This total also includes a recent $15 million grant to Harvard Catalyst (see sidebar).

The purpose of the Grand Opportunities grants is to solidify high-impact ideas that will benefit from short-term funding and may lay the foundation for new fields of scientific research. The GO grants based at the Quad range from a project to map exactly how cancers respond to drugs by establishing a new measure of drug effectiveness to developing a new technology for ultra-fast, ultra-cheap genome sequencing that might eventually lower the cost of processing an entire genome to under $100.

A list of the 24 Harvard-led GO grants appears below.

• Christophe Benoist, professor of pathology, and Diane Mathis, professor of pathology, “Gene Expression and Regulatory Networks in Human Leukocytes”

• Lynda Chin, professor of dermatology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and William Hahn, associate professor of medicine at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and BWH, “Functional Annotation of Cancer Genomes: The Cancer Genome Atlas, Glioblastoma and Ovarian Cancer”

• George Church, professor of genetics, “Development of Electron Microscopy-based Nucleic Acid Polymer Sequencing”

• George Church, professor of genetics; James Collins, of Boston University and the Wyss Institute; George Daley, associate professor of biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology at Children’s; Andrew Feinberg, of Johns Hopkins University; Tan Ince, assistant professor of pathology at BWH; Jarrod Marto, assistant professor of biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology at DFCI; and Peter Park, assistant professor of pediatrics at Children’s; “Comparative Phenotypic, Functional, and Molecular Analysis of Embryonic Stem Cells and Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells”

• Nathanael Gray, assistant professor of biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology at DFCI; Timothy Mitchison, the Hasib Sabbagh professor of systems biology; and Jeffrey Settleman, the Laurel Schwartz professor of medicine at HMS and Massachusetts General Hospital, “Mechanistic Signatures of Drug Responses in Cancer”

• Lee Kaplan, associate professor of medicine at MGH, “Small Animal Metabolic Surgery (SAMS) Resource Core”

• Mark Kieran, associate professor of pediatrics at DFCI and Children’s, “Phase II Trial of Lonafarnib, Pravastatin and Zoledronic Acid in Progeria”

• Taru Kinnunen, assistant professor of oral health policy and epidemiology at HSDM, “Oral Cancer Detection Methods in a Community Setting”

• Elizabeth Klerman, associate professor of medicine at BWH, “Human Circadian Sensitivity to Very Short Light Pulses”

• Joel Linden, of the University of Virginia, and David G. Nathan, the Robert A. Stranahan distinguished professor of pediatrics at HMS, DFCI, and Children’s, “Cardiac Translational Research Implementation Program: Treatment of Sickle Cell Crisis with Inhibitors of NKT Cell Activation”

• Eng Lo, professor of radiology at MGH, “Comparative Transcriptome of Brain Blood Vessels: Age, Hypertension and Diabetes”

• Nathan McDannold, assistant professor of radiology at BWH, “Blood–Brain Barrier Disruption Using Focused Ultrasound in a Large Animal Model”

• Matthew Meyerson, professor of pathology at DFCI, “An Infrastructure for Cancer Virus Discovery from Next-generation Sequencing Data”

• Vamsi Mootha, associate professor of systems biology and of medicine at MGH, “Defining the Genetic Basis of Human Respiratory Chain Disease”

• Dariush Mozaffarian, assistant professor of medicine at BWH and assistant professor in the Department of Epidemiology at HSPH, “Ancillary: Inflammation/Oxidation, Omega-3s, and Post-op Atrial Fibrillation and Cognitive Decline”

• Stuart Orkin, the David G. Nathan professor of pediatrics at HMS, DFCI, and Children’s, “Extending GWAS at the BCL11A Locus to Novel Therapeutics for Fetal Hemoblobin Induction”

• Pier Paolo Pandolfi, the George C. Reisman professor of medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, “The Co-clinical Project: Informing Clinical Trials Using Preclinical Mouse Models”

• Benjamin Raby, assistant professor of medicine at BWH; and Scott T. Weiss, professor of medicine at BWH and professor in the Department of Environmental Health at HSPH, “The Asthma Biorepository for Integrative Genomics Research”

• Debra Ritzwoller, of the Kaiser Permanente Institute for Health Research, and Jane Weeks, professor of medicine at DFCI and BWH and professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at HSPH, “Building Comparative Effectiveness Research Capacity: Aligning Cancer Research Network, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and State Resources to Map Cancer Care”

• Thomas Roberts, professor of pathology at DFCI, “Targeting PTEN Null Tumors via Inhibition of the p110beta Isoform of PI3 Kinase”

• David Rudner, assistant professor of microbiology and molecular genetics, “A Multidisciplinary Approach to Elucidating Gene Function in a Model Gram-positive Bacterium”

• Jie Shen, associate professor of neurology at BWH, “Neurodegeneration and Synaptic Transmission in Aging”

• Christopher A. Walsh, the Bullard professor of neurology at HMS, Children’s, and BID, “Human Autism Genetics and Activity Dependent Gene Activation”

• Frederick Wang, professor of medicine at BWH, “Epstein-Barr Virus: A Persistent Vaccine Vector”