Mount Sinai Microbiome Lab joins NIH’s Accelerating Medicines Partnership
Grant and Award Announcement
The National Institutes of the Health (NIH) has awarded researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai a four-year grant to study the role of the human microbiome in rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus, and other autoimmune diseases. The grant is part of the NIH’s Accelerating Medicines Partnership® Autoimmune and Immune-Mediated Diseases (AMP® AIM) program, which is designed to speed the discovery of new treatments and diagnostics. It will support the Microbiome Technology and Analytic Center Hub (Micro-TEACH), a multidisciplinary team of researchers at Icahn Mount Sinai and NYU Langone Health.
Researchers at the Marshall University Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine received a $1.3 million grant from the U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command, Department of Defense (DOD), to study the role of obesity and oxidative stress in Alzheimer’s disease.
Autonomous vehicle technology likely won't replace the workers behind the wheels of buses, vans and other vehicles shuttling people around cities and towns anytime soon, but mass transit authorities must examine how these technologies will affect both the operation of and the workforce driving public transportation. Researchers at Traffic21, a transportation research institute at Carnegie Mellon University, have urged officials and policymakers to preemptively consider the safety of incorporating automation technologies into their fleets, and training operators to work effectively with these systems.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced $53 million in funding awards for diverse small businesses to pursue advanced scientific instrumentation and technologies to address climate change. The funding will support 259 projects across 38 states that cover security and resilience, renewable energy, energy storage, carbon capture and conversion, and fusion energy, including projects that invest in disadvantaged communities to promote equitable research, development, and deployment of solutions. Developing new clean energy solutions is a key component of achieving President Biden’s goal of a net-zero carbon economy by 2050.
The Air Force Research Laboratory’s Minority Leaders Research Collaborative Program (ML-RCP) has awarded a two-year, $150,000 award to Ethan Ahn, an assistant professor of the UTSA Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. Ahn, UTSA’s inaugural recipient of the ML-RCP award, will use the money to fund his research to develop a new class of semiconducting materials for high temperature applications, and to develop the next generation of minority researchers.
Preet M. Chaudhary, MD, PhD, a professor of medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, and his research team have now developed an innovative treatment for prostate cancer, known as synthetic immune receptor (SIR-T) therapy. The new technology was adapted from chimeric antigen receptor (CAR-T) therapy, which has proven effective for several types of blood cancer. Chaudhary has been selected to receive a $5.8 million award from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), a publicly funded state initiative for stem cell research, to begin conducting preclinical studies of SIR-T therapy.
A survey of how academics use social media to encourage people to interact with their research argues that much of the public value of their work is being overlooked in official 'impact' assessments. The research analysed 200 examples of how academics encourage the uptake of their research on social media. It suggests the 'impact' measurements used to inform last week’s results from the ‘Research Excellence Framework’ – the official system for assessing research in the UK - require an update, because academics are now much more socially networked than they were when the system was devised.