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BY RUTHANN RICHTER

STANFORD, Calif. — Eighteen Stanford University School of Medicine projects that had been stalled by budget shortfalls at the National Institutes of Health are moving forward now, thanks to $6.9 million in federal economic stimulus funding.

Eleven of the newly funded projects had been peer-reviewed and approved but hadn’t received money yet. Another six involved supplemental grants to existing projects. And in one case, the NIH awarded $500,000 to a researcher to buy two photon microscopes that will be shared with other laboratories.

These projects are the first at the medical school to receive support under the national stimulus plan, with additional grants expected down the road, officials said.

“This is a lifesaver,” said Francis Blankenberg, MD, associate professor of radiology and of pediatrics, who received $655,000 in stimulus funds. “It really stabilizes the lab.”

Blankenberg and his colleagues are working on a novel radiotherapy approach to targeting breast and colon tumors. The technique uses a radiolabeled form of the protein called VEGF (vascular endothelial growth factor) to selectively target and destroy tumor vessels along with the tumor itself. The researchers initially had applied for a grant in 2007 and, after two more resubmissions, received a score in the 21st percentile. The cutoff was at the 15th percentile.

“In the old days, they probably would have funded it,” he said, but the project remained temporarily sidelined by the stiff competition for limited NIH money. The money will pay for two postdoctoral scholars, as well as Blankenberg and another faculty member part-time.

Philip Pizzo, MD, the dean of the School of Medicine, said the stimulus funding is critical to the country’s health-care reform effort because of the linkage between research and medical care.

“After six years of NIH funding that constantly lost its value against inflation—with a profoundly negative impact on our nation’s prized biomedical research enterprise—the stimulus funding is helping to take research off life support and breathe new hope for work that we hope will ultimately improve the lives of adults and children,” Pizzo said.

Roland Bammer, MD, an assistant professor of radiology, said his $790,000 grant under the program was a “big relief.”

“This was the application that was dearest to my heart, but I had difficulty funding it,” he said. “The NIH budget went down roughly 10 percent, so 90 out of 100 grant proposals were rejected in the past. It was tough.”

Bammer will use the funds for a project aimed at improving the technology involved in diffusion tensor imaging. DTI is a form of magnetic resonance imaging that provides more detailed information about the brain and other body structures, such as the heart and prostate, than traditional MRI. It can be used to detect early strokes, as well as brain tumors and other brain abnormalities, he said.

Bammer said the stimulus funding will enable him to pay the salaries of several full- and part-time employees. “This is really helpful,” he said.

The biggest grant funded under the stimulus program is a $1.6 million award to Amar Das, MD, PhD, assistant professor of medicine and of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, for a project funded by the National Library of Medicine. The researchers are developing methods to allow scientists in the biomedical community to understand disease patterns by extracting time-related and other useful information from large databases. For instance, they have been working with the NIH-supported National Database for Autism Research, helping researchers examine when neurodevelopmental problems arise in children and how they might be related to biological markers and imaging findings.

“It’s very exciting,” Das said of the grant. “It’s a great opportunity to advance our work in a rapid time frame and contribute to the field and enrich our research team.”

Das said the grant originally was submitted as a three-year project, but that he compressed it into two years to fit the stimulus program guidelines. With the money, he is planning to hire two new staff, a software engineer and a postdoctoral scholar, at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research.

Ann Arvin, MD, the university’s vice provost and dean of research, also received a grant of $444,000 for a project on the herpes simplex virus, which causes cold sores. She and colleagues have developed an animal model to help understand how the virus infects certain nerve cells, which give rise to the irritating sores. “It had been submitted (last July) as a small-scale, two-year proposal and as such, fit very well with the goal of funding two-year projects,” said Arvin, a professor of pediatrics and of microbiology and immunology.

Arvin said the national stimulus program is important in that it will allow the university to preserve jobs in scientific research. “During these difficult times, to be able to have people employed in science is really very important,” she said.

The grants also will allow for continuity in the education of postdoctoral scholars and graduate students who might otherwise be unemployed. In addition to postdocs working in the recently funded labs, two received direct grants for their work. James Blair, PhD, in developmental biology, and Elaine Trepagnier, PhD, in biochemistry, were awarded grants of $97,000 and $155,000, respectively, in this round of stimulus funding.

In this round of NIH stimulus funding, the full list of approved projects for the School of Medicine includes:

Investigator	Grant amount	Description
Ann Arvin	$443,848	Investigation of herpes simplex virus-1 neurotropism in SCID DRG xenografts
Roland Bammer	$790,700	Novel acquisition methods for diffusion MRI
James Blair	$97,264	Dissection of phospho-signaling that controls the Caulobacter cell cycle
Francis Blankenberg	$665,561	scVEGF targeted radiotherapy of mammary and colonic cancer
Xiaoyuan Chen	$665,984	VEGFR-2 targeted imaging
Amar Das	$1,610,696	Open-source toolkit for knowledge-based querying of time-oriented data
Mark Davis	$79,610	Influenza immunity: Protective mechanisms against a pandemic respiratory virus
C. Garrison Fathman	$49,328	Autoimmunity center of excellence at Stanford
David Feldman	$8,000	Development of vitamin D as a therapy for breast cancer
Aaron Hsueh	$440,716	Activation of dormant ovarian follicles
Stuart Kim	$500,000	2 photon microscopes
Michael Longaker	$21,375	Enhanced calvarial regeneration via RNAi-mediated suppression BMP antagonism
Michael Longaker	$20,416	The role of GSK-3beta in palate development and fusion
Minnie Sarwal	$440,000	Novel urinary proteomic biomarkers for acute renal transplant rejection
David Stevenson	$14,006	Therapeutic use of heme analogs: Absorption in intesting
Alejandro Sweet-Cordero	$543,887	Identification of novel kras effector pathways in lung cancer
Elaine Trepagnier	$155,118	Outer membrane heterogeniety and adaptability in isogenic bacteria
Kenneth Weinberg	$360,472	Stem cell-mediated reversal of thymic involution in premature aging models

 

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The Stanford University School of Medicine consistently ranks among the nation’s top 10 medical schools, integrating research, medical education, patient care and community service. For more news about the school, please visit http://mednews.stanford.edu. The medical school is part of Stanford Medicine, which includes Stanford Hospital & Clinics and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital. For information about all three, please visit http://stanfordmedicine.org/about/news.html.