HHMI pilot program funds people and a few projects

In an expansion of its mantra "people, not projects," the Howard Hughes Medical Institute for the first time is funding small groups of scientific collaborators working on specific ideas that reach beyond their primary research focus.

The biomedical research philanthropy today announced $40 million in grants over four years to eight groups led by HHMI investigators, including two from Harvard University and one from the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. The Collaborative Innovation Awards, which range from $700,000 to $1.4 million per year, make up a pilot program intended to spur innovation in a time of tighter federal funding for research. Typically HHMI supports scientists who become Howard Hughes investigators while continuing to work at their own institutions.

"We're excited about this program because of the quality of the projects, but also because it broadens the community of scientists supported by HHMI,” Thomas R. Cech, president of HHMI, said in a statement. "It incorporates people outside of the HHMI investigator program in solving important problems, and lets us do something really new."

The eight projects were selected from 62 proposals submitted last November.

Catherine Dulac of Harvard will lead a team looking at gene imprinting -- in which only one copy of two genes inherited from two parents is active -- to see how it shapes behavior and brain development. Her team includes Harvard colleagues Bill Carlezon, David Haig, and Naoshige Uchida.

Susan Lindquist of the Whitehead Institute and her team will search for the biological mechanisms that break down in Parkinson's disease and other neurodegenerative disorders and also try to create animal models to screen for therapies to treat the diseases. Her team members are Guy Caldwell of the University of Alabama, her colleague Rudolf Jaenisch of the Whitehead Institute, Richard Myers of Boston University, and Jean-Christophe Rochet of Purdue University.

Xiaowei Zhuang of Harvard and her team hope to develop technology that can map neural connections in mammalian brains. She is joined by Harvard colleagues Jeff Lichtman and Joshua Sanes, HHMI investigator Sebastian Seung of MIT, and Stephen Smith of Stanford University School of Medicine.

The five other teams are led by Simon John of Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine; Douglas C. Rees of California Institute of Technology; Danny Reinberg of New York University School of Medicine; Peter Walter of the University of California, San Francisco; and Dr. Huda Y. Zoghbi of Baylor College of Medicine.