A Medical Device Daily

The National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH; Bethesda, Maryland) reported the award of more than $12 million in grants for healthcare advancements.

The new grants will fund four investigators in developing: disposable microchips for the diagnosis of metastatic lung cancer, a bio-artificial kidney to eliminate dialysis procedures, insulin-producing cells to treat diabetes, and nanoparticles that selectively leave the blood and bind to cancer cells to assist in removal of brain tumors.

The overall goal of the NIBIB Quantum Grants program is to make advances in health care by funding research on targeted projects that will develop new technologies and modalities for the diagnosis, treatment, or prevention of disease.

“We are excited to be awarding these Quantum Grants to four excellent researchers and their interdisciplinary teams,” said NIBIB director Roderic Pettigrew, PhD, MD. “We look forward to watching the extraordinary results that will be achieved as these studies progress. All four of these projects have the potential to significantly improve the current practice of medicine.”

The awards are as follows:

• Anthony Atala, MD, Wake Forest University Health Sciences received $3.2 million (3 years) for a study on insulin producing cells from amniotic stem cells for diabetes therapy.

• Raoul Kopelman, PhD, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor received $2.6 million (3 years) for a study on nanoparticle-enabled intraoperative imaging and therapy.

• Shuvo Roy, PhD, Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine-CWRU received $3.2 million (3 years) for a study on a miniaturized implantable renal assist device for total renal replacement therapy.

• Mehmet Toner, PhD, Massachusetts General Hospital received $3.4 million (3 years) for a study on point-of-care microfluidics in lung cancer.

The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), reported making grants totaling more than $78 million over the next four years to expand the Encyclopedia Of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project, which in its pilot phase yielded provocative new insights into the organization and function of the human genome.

The ENCODE project aims to address this critical goal of genomics research.

In June, the ENCODE research consortium published a set of landmark papers in the journals Nature and Genome Research that found the organization, function and evolution of the genome to be far more complicated than most had suspected. For example, while researchers have traditionally focused on studying genes and their associated proteins, the ENCODE data indicate the genome is a very complex, interwoven network in which genes are just one of many types of DNA sequences with functional impact.

In addition to the research grants to support expansion of the ENCODE project, NHGRI also reported awards yesterday for two pilot-scale projects, the establishment of an ENCODE data coordination center, and six projects to develop novel methods and technologies aimed at helping the ENCODE project achieve its goals.

In contract news:

• The National Children’s Study said yesterday that it awarded contracts in late September to 22 new study centers to manage participant recruitment and data collection in 26 additional communities across the U.S. Funding for the new study centers and the study’s initial phase is a result of a $69 million appropriation from Congress in fiscal year 2007.

The study will follow a representative sample of 100,000 children from before birth to age 21, seeking information to prevent and treat some of the nation’s most pressing health problems, including autism, birth defects, diabetes, heart disease, and obesity.

“The National Children’s Study is poised to identify the early antecedents of a broad array of diseases that affect both children and adults,” said Elias Zerhouni, MD, Director of the National Institutes of Health. “Such insights will lead to the means to successfully treat and even prevent conditions that to date have defied our best efforts.”

The study centers will manage the study in 20 states. There are study locations in both urban and rural areas. Fifteen locations are in the Eastern part of the country, and 11 are in the West.

The National Children’s Study began in response to the Children’s Health Act of 2000, when Congress directed the NICHD and other federal agencies to undertake a national, long-term study of children’s health and development in relation to environmental exposures.

• Rules-Based Medicine, (RBM; Austin, Texas) a multiplexed biomarker testing laboratory for the life sciences industry, reported that the National Cancer Institute (NCI) has awarded the company a Phase I/Phase II “Fast-Track” Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract valued at $1,126,627.

The contract will fund the development of 50 new quantitative, multiplexed immunoassays for cancer-related proteins to be added to the automated RBM Human Multi-Analyte Profile (HumanMAP) platform. With the addition of these tests, RBM’s HumanMAP will be expanded to more than 100 quantitative immunoassays for cancer biomarkers (as part of an existing panel of nearly 300 immunoassays) available for fast, sensitive, reproducible and cost-effective use by the worldwide community of cancer researchers.