Curated News: National Institutes of Health (NIH)

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Michaela Gack, Ph.D., scientific director of Cleveland Clinic’s Florida Research and Innovation Center, has received a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s Pioneer Award to support her research toward the development of broad-spectrum antiviral drugs. The prestigious grant is part of NIH’s High-Risk, High-Reward Research Program, which funds highly innovative research with the potential for broad impact, and will provide $5.6 million over five years.

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Research will further shed light on the effects of environmental stressors on the developing brain--beginning before birth and following through the first ten years of life.

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Neurologists say it's time for a moonshot for their patients with ALS, the neurodegenerative disease that is always deadly, often in just a few years or less.

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Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and The Neuro (Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital) of McGill University have received a five-year grant expected to total $35.1 million for an extension of a study designed to develop biomarkers that indicate which people with the sleep disorder will go on to develop neurodegenerative diseases.

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Justin Perry, PhD, cell biologist and immunologist of Memorial Sloan Kettering’s (MSK) Sloan Kettering Institute (SKI) has been named one of 64 recipients of the prestigious 2021 National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s New Innovator Award. As part of the award, Dr. Perry will receive $1.5 million in direct costs split into two multi-year segments.

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Lu Sun, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Molecular Biology at UT Southwestern, has been awarded $1.5 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study interactions between neurons and glial cells in the brain, which could provide insight into the causes of neurological disorders.

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Jian Zhou, Ph.D., Assistant Professor in UT Southwestern’s Lyda Hill Department of Bioinformatics, has been awarded $1.5 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to use artificial intelligence to investigate the three-dimensional structure of DNA and its impact on health.

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People with rapid eye movement (REM) sleep behavior disorder act out their dreams. While sleeping safely in bed, for example, they might throw up their arms to catch an imaginary ball or try to run from an illusory assailant.

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Lorena Saelices Gomez, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Biophysics and in the Center for Alzheimer’s and Neurodegenerative Diseases at UT Southwestern, has been awarded $1.5 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to determine the structure of amyloids, key proteins that have been tied to diseases including Alzheimer’s and ATTR amyloidosis.

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A UT Southwestern research team has received the National Institutes of Health’s prestigious Transformative Research Award to further their study of zebra finches to investigate the genetic basis of vocal imitation abilities.

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A team of Florida State University researchers has received a National Institutes of Health Director’s Transformative Research Award worth $3.1 million to investigate racial inequities in the nation’s health-care system. The award is the first of its kind to be administered by the National Institute of Minority Health and Health Disparities, part of the NIH.

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Van Andel Institute’s J. Andrew Pospisilik, Ph.D., and Maine Medical Center Research Institute’s Joseph Nadeau, Ph.D., have earned a five-year, $9.6 million Transformative Research Award from the National Institutes of Health to answer a set of questions that could fundamentally transform our understanding of health and disease: If you were born multiple times under the exact same circumstances, would you turn out to be the same person each time?

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Ana Gomes, Ph.D., assistant member of Moffitt’s Molecular Oncology Department, has been awarded a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s New Innovator (DP2) Award. The five-year grant will fund research aimed at understanding how metabolic and epigenetic changes that occur during aging may drive cancer.

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A new $3.1-million, four-year grant co-led by faculty at Binghamton University, State University of New York could help African American and Latinx youth living with HIV.

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The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development has awarded more than $2.5 million to University of California, Irvine researchers seeking to elicit from children more accurate information about maltreatment.

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Cedars-Sinai is joining a nationwide study to investigate how children's development is impacted by biological and environmental exposures, especially to opioids, marijuana, alcohol and tobacco, before and shortly after birth. The goal is to develop insights that can inform public policy to improve the health of children across the nation.

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The Bronx has been hit disproportionally by COVID-19. For caregivers in the borough, the pandemic has caused unprecedented psychological distress. In addition to existing health disparities, these families now face greater financial insecurity and challenges related to their school-aged children.

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International group of researchers identify new childhood genetic condition and a potential cure that can be delivered during pregnancy.

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A common mutation in gliomas sensitizes them to immunotherapy, a finding which researchers believe could have broader therapeutic implications for all glioma patients.

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A new community-based approach to helping children manage their asthma symptoms will launch in up to 40 public, charter, and parochial schools across the Bronx, and enroll 416 students aged 4-12 years old. The five-year study, titled Evaluation of the Asthma Management Program to Promote Activity for Students in Schools (Asthma-PASS), is supported by a $4.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore (CHAM).

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Is problem-solving therapy effective in treating individuals who have both depression and obesity? Researchers at the University of Illinois Chicago have identified an important step toward discovering how and why therapies and treatments work. 

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UChicago Medicine physician-scientists aimed to find out how the immune systems of children with a type of cancer called neuroblastoma respond to tumors. The answer to this question could help guide the treatment of pediatric patients.

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Laryngology researcher Kristina Simonyan, MD, PhD, Dr med, of Mass Eye and Ear, has been awarded an $11.9 million P50 Clinical Research Center Grant from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communicable Disorders to form a new multidisciplinary center across four academic medical institutions that will be committed to conducting research on laryngeal dystonia and voice tremor, two debilitating neurological voice disorders.

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A University of Miami Miller School of Medicine urologist was awarded a significant R01 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for a first-of-its-kind study for treating erectile dysfunction using a combination of platelet-rich plasma and shockwave therapy.

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New research from Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center investigators shows why some drugs in clinical trials for treating a form of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) often fail and demonstrates a way to restore their effectiveness.

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New research from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis suggests that radiation therapy can reprogram heart muscle cells to what appears to be a younger state, fixing electrical problems that cause a life-threatening arrhythmia without the need for a long-used, invasive procedure.

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Researchers and data scientists at UT Southwestern Medical Center and MD Anderson Cancer Center have developed an artificial intelligence technique that can identify which cell surface peptides produced by cancer cells called neoantigens are recognized by the immune system.

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Sanford Burnham Prebys professor Peter D. Adams, Ph.D., and Salk Institute professor Gerald Shadel, Ph.D., have been awarded a grant from the NIH’s National Institute on Aging for $13 million, funding a five-year project to explore the connection between aging and liver cancer.

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Recently, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai a five-year grant to out whether exposing patients to a combination of light therapies will slow Alzheimer’s debilitating effects.

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In a study with mice reported today in the journal Science Translational Medicine, a Johns Hopkins Medicine research team has provided what may be the most definitive view to date of the biological process leading to necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC), a dangerous inflammatory disease that can destroy a premature infant’s intestinal lining and causes death in up to a third of the cases.

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This discovery, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), suggest that MUC5AC could become a target of better therapeutics to untangle the super thick and sticky mucus that plays a role in health problems for millions of people suffering from pulmonary conditions.

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A research team led by Stony Brook University has used molecular biology and cryoelectron microscopy to successfully unravel the structure of bacterial appendages called P pili. The finding, published in Nature Communications, is a key step in order to target P pili in the infection process.

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A new $13.3 million contract from the National Institutes of Health’s Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics initiative, or RADx, will enable the UCLA SwabSeq lab to expand its capacity to process thousands of COVID-19 tests a day.

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Iowa State researchers affiliated with the Nanovaccine Institute have explained how a nanomaterial initiates antibody production by the immune system's B cells. The technique could be used to turn B cells into factories that provide antibodies for diagnostic tests or treatments.

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Rush researchers have shown that two lab-developed and nasally-delivered peptides helped slow the spread of alpha-synuclein in mice.

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Scientists have developed a method using machine learning to better analyze data from a powerful scientific tool: nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). One way NMR data can be used is to understand proteins and chemical reactions in the human body. NMR is closely related to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for medical diagnosis.

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University of Delaware materials scientist Xinqiao Jia has received a combined $4.85 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for research to develop new approaches in tissue engineering. Jia and colleagues will explore ways to regenerate salivary glands damaged by radiation therapy for head and neck cancers. She also will focus on understanding what causes damage or scarring to vocal folds, the pliable tissue that enables our ability to talk.

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Michael J. Moore, a professor of biomedical engineering at Tulane University School of Science and Engineering, is part of a national study that aims to turn around the statistics on opioid addiction.

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The Biopsychosocial Health lab from Wayne State University has been awarded $3,590,488 from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health to conduct a project titled “Stress and Cardiovascular Risk Among Urban African American adults: A Multilevel, Mixed Methods Approach.”

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A large international collaboration led by researchers from the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center has identified promising new targets for pancreatic cancer treatment and early diagnosis after examining various aspects of these tumors’ genes and proteins.

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Rutgers School of Public Health assistant professor, Devin English, has received the 2021 Sexual and Gender Minority Early-Stage Investigator Award from the National Institutes of Health.

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At a time when incidence of Lyme disease is rising across the U.S., a study led by University of Kentucky College of Medicine researcher Brian Stevenson, Ph.D., may provide a significant impact in the fight against the disease. A new study will build upon Stevenson's three decades of research aimed at understanding Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacteria that causes Lyme disease.

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Immunologists and geneticists at UT Southwestern Medical Center have discovered how vitamin A enters immune cells in the intestines – findings that could offer insight to treat digestive diseases and perhaps help improve the efficacy of some vaccines.

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The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has selected Penn Medicine as one of 25 award recipients across 30 sites in the United States to serve as Impact of Genomic Variation on Function (IGVF) investigators, with the goal of better understanding how genetic differences impact how human genes function, and how these variations influence human health and disease.

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Male infertility is on the rise, with significant declines in sperm quantity and quality occurring across the human population worldwide in the past two decades. The reason for this is poorly understood, but scientists suspect spermatogenesis – the process by which sperm develops – is a crucial piece in this puzzle.

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Albert Einstein College of Medicine has received a five-year, $5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to support the Rose F. Kennedy Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center (RFK IDDRC), which has been at the forefront of research on normal and abnormal brain development for more than 50 years.