Collaborative Research Grant Awards
The Harvard Medical School Portugal Program in partnership with Portugal's Ministry of Science and Technology is excited to announce it has awarded USD 1.4 million to three collaborative research grants created to help to build bridges both between Portuguese groups and between Portuguese and Harvard scholars and students.These grants will also provide an ideal training environment for Portuguese scientists, ensuring a new generation of effective scientists and physician-scientists. The three proposals focused particularly on questions relevant to medicine at the frontier of translational and clinical sciences. These are the first grants the Program has awarded.
Three projects were chosen for funding:
- "Improving perinatal decision-making: development of complexity-based dynamical measures and novel
acquisition systems"
- "New drugs for treating and eradicating malaria"
- "Causes and consequences of centrosome and ploidy abnormalities in human cancer using Barrett's
esophagus as a model."
A total of 38 proposals were submitted from teams of researchers in Portugal and Harvard. The projects submitted were evaluated by an independent panel comprised of Harvard faculty and doctors. The Clinical and Translational Collaborative Research Grants are designed to enhance and enlarge the clinical and translational research infrastructure in Portugal and to promote collaboration not only within Portugal but also internationally.
Improving perinatal decision-making: development of complexity-based dynamical measures and novel acquisition systems
One of the three winning projects, led by Harvard Medical School PI, Dr Madalena Costa, and Portuguese PI, Dr Diogo Ayres de Campos, focuses on intrapartum complications. Intrapartum complications account for more than one-millinon newborn deaths worldwide each year and remain an important cause of lifelong neurologic and developmental morbidity and suffering for families. In more than half of such cases, failure to detect and respond to changes in fetal status play a significant role in the causation of abnormal neonatal outcomes. Interpretation of fetal heart rate, a current mainstay for monitoring, is a frequent target of criticism. A computer system for analysis of fetal monitoring signals was developed at the University of Porto, by the researchers involved in this project, to overcome the poor reproducibility of visual analysis. The grant provides a unique opportunity to address this health priority by bringing together teams with complementary and synergistic expertise in maternal/fetal health, computerized fetal heart rate analysis and complex signals analysis.
New Drugs for Treating and Eradicating Malaria
Another of the winning entries is led by Dr Jon Clardy, the Hsien Wu and Daisy Yen Wu Professor in the Department of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Biology at HMS and Dr Maria Manuela Mota from the Instituto de Medicina Molecular de Lisboa. An interdisciplinary team comprised of Dr Clardy, Dr Mota and Portuguese as well as HMS faculty , with combined expertise in malaria biology, small molecule screening, human genetics, target identification, and medicinal chemistry aim to discover and develop drugs to be used in an eradication campaign against malaria.
Causes and consequences of centrosome and ploidy abnormalities in human cancer using Barrett's esophagus as a model
The third project awarded funding is led by Dr David Pellman, Margaret M Dyson Professor of Pediatric Oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Children's Hospital, Boston and Professor of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School, and Mónica Dias, from the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciências de Oeiras, focuses on cancer of the esophagus and the progression and initial formation of metastases. The results of this work may pave the way for a better understanding of the formation and metastatis of tumors, finding new forms of treatment.
Each grant will provide funding for three years.
See article in Focus: http://focus.hms.harvard.edu/2010/042310/community.shtml
For further information visit the Harvard Medical School Portugal Program website http://www.hmsportugal.org/