Seed Grants

The purpose of HSCI Seed Grants is to provide early funding for innovative projects in any field of stem cell research. The awards put particular emphasis on projects that might be difficult to fund from other sources, either because a project is considered to be "high risk/high reward" or because the research is ineligible for federal funding under the current federal restrictions on human embryonic stem cell research. Seed grants are open to any investigator with a Harvard affiliation.

For the eighth consecutive year, HSCI awarded seed grants to scientists throughout the HSCI community to provide critical early-stage funding for stem cell research. In 2012, 10 seed grants totaling $1.8 million were awarded to investigators selected from a large pool of applicants across HSCI-affiliated institutions.

This year’s grants will support stem cell research in a variety of targeted disease areas such as diabetes, nervous system, and cardiovascular diseases. The grants will also support research of broadly applicable areas of stem cell and regenerative biology, such as tissue regeneration and gene mapping. Applications in both the basic science and translational categories were considered, and were received from nine research institutions.

Click to view seed grant recipients from previous years:  2012 | 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005

2013 Seed Grant Recipients

Project Lead Affiliation Title  
Reza Abdi, MD Brigham and Women’s Hospital The targeted delivery of Mesenchymal Stem cells for the treatment of type 1 diabetes  
Suneet Agarwal, MD, PhD Boston Children’s Hospital Manipulating heteroplasmy in mitochondrial genetic diseases  
Sangmi Chung, PhD McLean Hospital Human medial ganglionic eminence cells as a potential source for novel cell-based therapy for temporal lobe epilepsy  
Natasha Frank, MD Boston Children’s Hospital ABCB5+ limbal stem cells for LSCD therapy  
Jenna Galloway, PhD Massachusetts General Hospital Tendon Regeneration in Zebrafish  
Tatsuya Kobayashi, MD, PhD Massachusetts General Hospital Characterization and manipulation of articular cartilage chondrocytes as stem/progenitor cells  
Maria Kontaridis, PhD and Amy Roberts, MD Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center/ Boston Children’s Hospital Elucidation of the epigenetic, transcriptional, and differentiation abnormalities underlying RASopathy disorders in iPS cells  
David Milan, MD Massachusetts General Hospital Novel Method to Map Human Genetic Disease using Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells  
Jayaraj Rajagopal, MD Massachusetts General Hospital Developing Humanized Mouse Models of Respiratory Disease