Date: April 21, 2014 By:
Five principal investigators from the US and South Africa were awarded the first round of funding from the new Ragon TB Seed Grants.
One of the primary missions of the Ragon Institute is to provide a means for rapidly funding promising studies and emerging concepts in the field of HIV research. Since 2009, the Ragon Institute has supported Innovation and Fellowship awards to provide a substantial pool of accessible, flexible funding for HIV research. Such funding encourages innovation, compresses the time it takes to conduct bench-to-bedside research and attracts new minds to the field.
The Ragon TB Seed Grants, launched in this year, focused on immunology and microbiology of Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection. The four areas of research for which proposals were accepted are:
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These awards, supported by the Mark and Lisa Schwartz Foundation, provide $50,000 direct and $7,500 indirect funding for one year.
The first five recipients of this award and these projects are:
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“This award is critical to our continuing efforts to better understand HIV/TB coinfection in lung tissue,” said recipient and Ragon faculty member, Dr. Douglas Kwon. “We’re truly excited about the opportunities this funding will provide.”
It is anticipated that applications for a second round of TB Seed Grant funding will be open in early 2015.
Image (L-R): Douglas Kwon, Thumbi Ndung’u, Anne Goldfeld, Deborah Hung, Galit Alter
A collaborative effort between researchers from Uganda, Tanzania, the US, Spain, and Denmark has resolved a longstanding question in malaria research: Do individuals living in regions with continuous malaria transmission develop broadly neutralizing antibodies (BnAbs) against the malaria parasite? The answer is yes.
Researchers at the Ragon Institute of Mass General Brigham, MIT, and Harvard have uncovered critical insights into how aging impairs the immune system’s ability to fight cancer.