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Children’s Translational Research Program (TRP) has issued its first round of five-year Investigator Awards. The intent is to support and cultivate promising faculty-scientists, give them protected time to conduct translational research and, most importantly, help them bring their discoveries to clinical development.
The three awardees, Bernhard Kuhn, MD (Department of Cardiology), Mustafa Sahin, MD, PhD (Department of Neurology), and Dario Fauza, MD (Department of Surgery), will receive funding for half of their salaries. As junior investigators, Kuhn and Sahin will receive an additional $40,000 a year in research support.
Kuhn, winner of the American College of Cardiology’s 2007 Young Investigator Award, is working to regenerate heart tissue as a way of treating heart attacks in adults and heart failure due to congenital heart disease in children. Kuhn’s prior work in rats found that a patch soaked in a growth-stimulating substance called periostin, placed over the site of cardiac injury, regenerated heart muscle and improved pumping ability; he now plans to use his TRP award to take the findings to patients.
Sahin, who received the Young Investigator Award from the Child Neurology Society in 2005, studies how nerve cells connect to one another and how this connectivity goes awry in disease. He focuses on tuberous sclerosis complex (TSC), a neuro-genetic disease that causes benign tumors in the brain (and elsewhere in the body) and has neurologic symptoms. His laboratory has produced evidence for abnormal neuronal connectivity in TSC, a finding that also has implications for epilepsy, developmental delay and autism.
Fauza, whose postdoctoral fellows have won American Academy of Pediatrics awards for four consecutive years, works with fetal stem cells—taken from amniotic fluid during pregnancy—to repair congenital diaphragmatic hernias and congenital airway obstruction in newborns. Much work has been done in animals and Fauza hopes the project, combining stem cell biology with tissue engineering, will lay the groundwork for treating a variety of congenital anomalies at birth, later in life and through Children’s Advanced Fetal Care Center, where he is director of research.
The awards are part of an overall strategy to build a Translational Investigator Service, a multidisciplinary cadre of productive faculty-scientists with leadership skills and strong scientific and clinical backgrounds. “Success of this program will facilitate the rapid translation of discovery sciences into human trials and facilitate the use of human patient resources in advancing scientific discovery,” says TRP Director, David Williams, MD, PhD, also chief of Hematology/Oncology. A second round of applications are due May 1. |
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