New EUREKA awards fund highly innovative research, promise big payoffs

The National Institutes of Health has awarded 56 grants of up to $67.4 million to support highly innovative research projects that promise big scientific payoffs. The new awards are part of the EUREKA (Exceptional, Unconventional Research Enabling Knowledge Acceleration) program, which helps scientists test new, unconventional ideas or tackle major methodological or technical challenges.

"EUREKA awards reflect NIH's continued commitment to funding transformative research, even if it carries more than the usual degree of scientific risk," said NIH Director Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D. "The grants seek to elicit those 'eureka moments' when scientists make major theoretical or technical advances."

EUREKA researchers will receive direct costs of approximately $200,000 per year for up to four years. Ten of the projects totaling $10.6 million are two-year grants supported by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Among the new grants are projects that seek to:

Develop new vectors to facilitate the use of gene therapy to treat neurological diseases in children and adults.

Miguel Sena Esteves, Ph.D., University of Massachusetts Medical School

Use single-celled bacteria and yeast to understand the evolution of circadian clocks, which control sleep-wake cycles and other daily rhythms in humans and other organisms.

Carl H. Johnson, Ph.D., Vanderbilt University

Develop a system for mining the published literature to validate scientific predictions of protein structure and function, which could help improve the accuracy of prediction and facilitate progress in identifying targets for drug discovery.

Karin Maria Verspoor, PhD., University of Colorado

"The research supported by EUREKA could provide us with new concepts, tools and approaches that have a profound impact on our understanding of biology—from fundamental life processes to human diseases and behavior," said Jeremy M. Berg, Ph.D., director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), which led the development of the EUREKA program.

Source: NIH/National Institute of General Medical Sciences