Science Market Update

New Research Grant Funding for Minnesota Neuroscience and Diabetes

Posted by Jaimee Saliba on Wed, Feb 15, 2012


Thanks to a longtime Minnesota philanthropist and the State of Minnesota, neuroscience and diabetes researchers at the University of Minnesota and the Mayo Clinic are looking at millions in research grant funding from two new programs:

Minnesotans are already familiar with the generosity of the late Win Wallin, formerly of Pillsbury and Medtronic, whose name is on a new Medical Biosciences Building in the Minneapolis Biomedical Discovery District (on the Twin Cities campus), and whose scholarship program has sent promising urban students to college at UMinn for two decades.  Now, in his honor, a new grant program has been announced by the Wallin charity to provide $500,000 a year in funding for bold research in neuroscience at the University.  UMinn recommended neuroscience as the best candidate field for the new grant program, which will provide support to bridge the gap between seed funding and result demonstration sufficient to draw NIH grants.

new research grant program

[Maxine and Winston Wallin of Minneapolis, courtesy of UMN, credit: Don Dickinson]

The first four recipients of the Wallin Discovery Fund awards in neuroscience are:

  • Kenneth Baker: “Deep Brain Stimulation for the Treatment of Drug Addiction”
  • Gulin Oz: “Noninvasive Assessment of Cerebral Energetics in Neurodegeneration”
  • Yasushi Nakagawa: “Afferent Control of Cortical Neurogenesis in the Mouse”
  • A. David Redish: “Nanowire Tetrodes”

 


The Decade of Discovery
is a research initiative of the Minnesota Partnership for Biotechnology and Medical Genomics, a collaboration between UMinn and the Mayo Clinic aimed at preventing and treating diabetes through research. Funded by the State of Minnesota, the partnership has recently announced a $1.86M award to three diabetes research projects being carried on jointly by the two institutions' researchers:

The Chip — Yogish Kudva and Ananda Basu, Mayo Clinic diabetes researchers, will join engineering professor Steven Koester of UMinn to develop a specialized electronic chip that will improve glucose monitoring and provide a critical component to the artificial pancreas being developed by the Mayo Clinic ($500,000).

The Drug TargetsUMinn physiologist Alessandro Bartolomucci and Mayo endocrinologist John Miles are working to develop an anti-obesity drug ($875,000).

The Mouse Model Immunologist Brian Fife and colleagues at UMinn will work with Govindarajan Rajagopalan and Chella David of the Mayo Clinic to test and validate mouse models containing human diabetes cells against various factors ($486,368).

 

Biotechnology Calendar, Inc. is a full service event marketing and planning company producing on-campus, life science research trade shows nationwide for the past 19 years. We plan and promote each event to bring the best products and services to the finest research campuses across the country.  In July we hold three product shows in Minnesota, offering excellent opportunties for sales, networking, and discovery:

  • 7/26/2012 -- Minneapolis BioResearch Product Faire on the Twin Cities campus of UMinn
  • 7/27/2012 -- St. Paul BioResearch Product Faire FrontLine event on the St. Paul UMN campus
  • 7/25/2012 -- Rochester BioResearch Product Faire event at the Mayo Clinic campus

Click below for show information, and see our complete 2012 Show Schedule.

minnesota researchminnesota research program

 

Tags: Midwest, 2012 Research Funding, University of Minnesota, Diabetes, Minnesota, Mayo Clinic, Neuroscience, Funding, new research grants

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