Biotech center awards research grants topping $700,000

Research Triangle Park, N.C. — Researchers at Wake Forest University, East Carolina, N.C. A&T and UNC-Wilmington will receive more than $700,000 in research grants from the North Carolina Biotechnology Center.

The grants are for work in projects ranging from breast cancer to raising truffles.

The grant program offers awards up to $75,000 and is designed to foster early stage work that could lead to additional funding.

Wake Forest researchers received $372,221 for five grants. ECU researchers received $175,375 for three grants. NCA&T, UNC-Wilmington and UNC Greensboro received one each.

The awards, as described by the Biotech Center:

• $25,415 to Colin Burns, Ph.D., of East Carolina University in Greenville, to develop anti-HIV agents.
• $75,000 to Garry Dawson, Ph.D., of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, to study nanoparticle-enhanced separations for biomarker detection.
• $75,000 to William Gmeiner, Ph.D., of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, to develop multivalent aptamer complexes from triplex DNA scaffolds.
• $75,000 to Ashok Hegde, Ph.D., of WFU, to develop an Alzheimer’s disease treatment.
• $75,000 to Omoanghe Isikhuemhen, Ph.D., of North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University in Greensboro, to use biotechnology methods for the mass propogation, inoculation and screening of truffle-inoculated seedlings.
• $75,000 to W. Todd Lowther, Ph.D., of WFU, to develop cancer therapies from fatty acid synthase inhibitors.
• $75,000 to Jed Macosko, Ph.D., of WFU, to develop a nanoscale “Lab-On-Bead” that can process encoded chemical libraries.
• $72,221 to Michael Robbins, Ph.D., of WFU, to develop a rat model to study radiation-induced brain injury in children.
• $74,960 to George Sigounas, Ph.D., of ECU, to investigate screening tools to detect DNA damage in normal and cancerous human breast tissue.
• $75,000 to Mary Thomassen, Ph.D., of ECU, to explore carbon nanotubes as a tool for generating an experimental model of pulmonary sarcoidosis.
• $75,000 to Sridhar Varadarajan, Ph.D., of the University of North Carolina Wilmington, to develop a breast cancer therapy.

This grant program, which is designed in part to foster more research outside of the Triangle, is not open to UNC-Chapel Hill, N.C. State or Duke, according to the Biotech Center.

The program was launched in 2006 and thus far has awarded almost $1.6 million to researchers.