Texas Children's Hospital and UH land over $17 million in research grants

Two grand grants have been secured by medical research organizations in Houston, allowing for giant leaps in investigations at the Texas Medical Center.

Neurological research at Baylor College of Medicine is getting a big boost from a $14.85 million grant to complete a neurological research center at Texas Children's Hospital. The funding arrives from the National Institutes of Health to complete two floors of the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute.

"Texas Children's Hospital really recognized the problem of the number of children affected by neurological diseases, and the fact that there is very little to offer these patients beyond diagnostics and supportive therapy was the impetus for Baylor College of Medicine to apply for the grant," Dr. Huda Zoghbi tells CultureMap.

Dr. Zoghbi is a professor in the departments of molecular and human gentics, pediatrics, neurology and neuroscience at BCM and director of the Jan and Dan Duncan NRI. She is also an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

"With the new space, we will advance our understanding of what goes wrong in children's development — what molecules are changing, what genetic pathways are being altered — so that we may develop mechanisms to find cures," she adds.

The grant will fund the interior build-out of particular floors in the NRI, a multidisciplinary research facility for pediatric neurological diseases such as autism, epilepsy, Batten disease, cerebral palsy, and Rett and Angelman syndromes.

Scheduled to open later this year, the NRI will allow Baylor to recruit new faculty with expertise currently lacking in the Texas Medical Center. It will be the first facility in the U.S. entirely dedicated to researching pediatric cognitive developmental and neurological disorders and developing treatments for them.

"There is no place like this in the country that is dedicated to such research," Zoghbi says. "We're really quite excited about it because it will bring so much more talent to Houston."

The chunk of change will also be used to build space for Nuclear Magnetic Resonance equipment that will help researchers identify metabolic fingerprints of different disorders. 

University of Houston is also the recipient of some righteous funds, in the form of a $2.4 million cancer research grant for investigating a new multidisciplinary approach to fighting cancer. The dollars are being doled out by the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, which oversees the state's $3 billion in cancer research programs.

The award will fund postdoctoral scientists at UH whose research combines cancer biology with computational disciplines such as computer science, theoretical physics or chemistry.

Administered by the Keck Center for Interdisciplinary Bioscience at the Texas Medical Center, the program will begin choosing a dozen researchers beginning in September. Participants will be matched with two faculty mentors — one in computational field and one in cancer biology, chosen from UH, BCM, Rice University, UT Health Science Center, UT Medical Branch Galveston or M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.

What's more, the program will provide summer research opportunities for about 20 undergraduates.

• cancer, grants, medicine, research, research grants, Texas Medical Center
• Huda Zoghbi

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