The Massachusetts Life Sciences Center is awarding $1.3 million in investigator grants over the next two years to scientists at universities and research institutions across the state.
It’s the second round of what the center calls “New Investigator Research Matching Grants.” The first round of $3.1 million over three years started in July 2008. The grants are given with the understanding that they’ll be matched dollar-for-dollar by the scientists’ research institutions.
Research institutions affiliated with Harvard University fared best by far, grabbing three of the seven available grants for a Harvard-affiliated teaching hospital. Brandeis, UMass Medical School, Boston University Medical Center and Northeastern University split the rest.
A list of the grantees:
Harvard affiliated institutions
Dr. Sun Hur, Immune Disease Institute at Children’s Hospital: $200,000 to study immune receptors for drug discovery.
Dr. Raul Mostolovsky, Massachusetts General Hospital: $200,000 to study the potential link between metabolism, DNA repair and cancer.
Dr. Konstantina Stankovic, Massachusetts Eye & Ear Infirmary: $200,000 to research a method for treating hearing loss due to neural degeneration.
Other institutions
Dr. Jeffrey Bailey, UMass Medical School: $200,000 to study why some people are genetically immune to malaria.
Dr. Christopher Gabel, Boston University Medical Center: $200,000 to study neural regeneration after spinal cord injuries.
Dr. Mark Niedre, Northeastern University: $360,512 to develop an instrument to non-invasively detect very rare cells circulating in the blood.
Dr. Satoshi Yoshida, Brandeis University: $200,000 to study how yeast cells maintain cell wall integrity under environmental stress.