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Dr. Rene Anand has been awarded one of only a few dozen special NIH grants from a new program called EUREKA (for Exceptional, Unconventional Research Enabling Knowledge Acceleration), designed to help investigators test novel, often unconventional hypotheses or tackle major methodological or technical challenges. These exceptionally innovative research projects are funded because they could have an extraordinarily significant impact on many areas of science.
"EUREKA projects promise remarkable outcomes that could revolutionize science," said the past NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni, M.D. "The program reflects NIH's commitment to supporting potentially transformative research, even if it carries a greater than usual degree of scientific risk."
Diseases involving membrane proteins are major concerns of public health including mental illnesses such as autism and schizophrenia, neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease, and other diseases such as heart disease and cancer. To guide the design of drugs that are highly specific for the membrane protein targets to treat these diseases, atomic level knowledge about the structures of human membrane proteins are badly needed. Despite decades of work, the structures of very few membrane proteins are known because these proteins are hard to obtain in quantities necessary to do structural studies. Dr. Anand has teamed up with Dr. Gregg Wells, a biophysicist from the Texas A&M Health Sciences Center to explore re-engineering the electric organ of electric fish such as the electric eel or the electric ray to express human membrane proteins that are important drug targets. These electric fish over millions of years of evolution have developed specialized cells called "electrocytes" that are chalk full of membrane proteins called nicotinic receptors. These fish generate huge electrical discharges that stun their prey by activating the flow of charged ions through these receptors. The goal of the EUREKA project is to examine whether the electrocytes can be re-engineered to make a foreign human protein in sufficiently large amounts for structural studies such as NMR and X-ray crystallography.
"EUREKA is an experiment in how to attract, identify, and support particularly creative approaches that, if successful, could move science forward dramatically," said Jeremy M. Berg, Ph.D., director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), which led the development of the EUREKA program. NIGMS supports basic research that increases understanding of life processes and forms the foundation for advances in disease diagnois, treatment, and prevention.
For more details on the EUREKA grants, see links:
NIH Awards First EUREKA Grants for Exceptionally Innovative ...
http://www.nih.gov/news/health/sep2008/nigms-03.htm
NIH wants your off-the-wall research ideas... really - Science ...
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/sciencecareers/2008/08/nih-wants-your.html
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