A Medical Device Daily

A Stanford University School of Medicine (Stanford, California) researcher has pinpointed the mechanism by which a gene associated with both autism and schizophrenia influences behavior in mice. The school reported he received a $1.65 million government grant to expand his efforts to include many more such genes.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) had put aside $60 million of its allocation as part of the economic stimulus package specifically for research on autism, and Sudhof's proposal was chosen amid heavy competition.

He and his colleagues in the Stanford Institute for Neuro-Innovation and Translational Neurosciences said that they intend to use the grant to find out if other genes affect the nervous system. The investigators will use established techniques to inactivate or increase the activity of 81 autism-associated genes in cultured mouse neurons, and then assess whether these changes affect neural development, synapse density and synapse function.

In other grants news:

• Urovalve (Newark, New Jersey) reported that it has received $400,000 in new funding from the NIH to advance development of its Surinate Bladder Management System – designed to improve the quality of life of men who suffer from acute or chronic urinary retention, an inability to empty the bladder. The grant is the third from NIH to Urovalve, bringing the company's total NIH funding to $1.24 million.

To date, Urovalve has now raised $4.2 million from private investors and other sources, including NIH and the New Jersey Commission of Science and Technology (NJCST; Trenton).

• Smiths Detection (London) reported a $2.2 million, two-year grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the NIH, to develop a test for multiple types of influenza.

The test will run on Smiths Detection's Clinical Bio-Seeq instrument, designed to be used at Point of Care.

The company also reported the award of a $1 million, two-year grant from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (Bethesda, Maryland) to develop a rapid test for eight micro-organisms that commonly cause burn/wound infections leading to septicemia (blood-poisoning). The test will run on Smiths Detection's Clinical Bio-Seeq System, designed to be used at Point of Care in Critical Care settings.