Blau and Heilshorn Awarded 2024 BioX Seed Grant

The Blau and Heilshorn Labs were awarded 2024 BioX Interdisciplinary Seed Grants for their proposal Engineering of Lipid Metabolite Pathways as a Spinal Cord Injury Therapy. The Stanford Bio-X Seed Grants fund proposals that enhance interdisciplinary research among the Stanford scientific communities in areas related to bioengineering, biosciences, and biomedicine, providing seed funding for high-risk, high-reward collaborative proposals including basic research leading to fundamental discoveries, as well as innovative technology, relating to human health.

Cervical spinal cord injury (SCI) is devastating, and there is currently no cure. This proposed interdisciplinary collaboration combines expertise in materials science and cell biology to explore an intriguing hypothesis that manipulation of prostaglandin E2 (PGE2), a lipid metabolite that is part of the body’s natural healing mechanism, can protect spinal neurons following SCI and induce recovery of sensory and motor function.