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.

 

 

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