2013 HSCI Seed Grant recipients announced

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. 2013 Seed Grant Recipients Reza Abdi, MDBrigham and Women’s HospitalThe targeted delivery of Mesenchymal Stem cells for the treatment of type 1 diabetes Suneet Agarwal, MD, PhDBoston Children’s HospitalManipulating heteroplasmy in mitochondrial genetic diseases Sangmi Chung, PhDMcLean HospitalHuman medial ganglionic eminence cells as a potential source for novel cell-based therapy for temporal lobe epilepsy Natasha Frank, MDBoston Children’s HospitalABCB5+ limbal stem cells for LSCD therapy Jenna Galloway, PhDMassachusetts General HospitalTendon Regeneration in Zebrafish Tatsuya Kobayashi, MD, PhDMassachusetts General HospitalCharacterization and manipulation of articular cartilage chondrocytes as stem/progenitor cells Maria Kontaridis, PhD and Amy Roberts, MDBeth Israel Deaconess Medical Center/ Boston Children’s HospitalElucidation of the epigenetic, transcriptional, and differentiation abnormalities underlying RASopathy disorders in iPS cells David Milan, MDMassachusetts General HospitalNovel Method to Map Human Genetic Disease using Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells Jayaraj Rajagopal, MDMassachusetts General HospitalDeveloping Humanized Mouse Models of Respiratory Disease