The Johns Hopkins Medicine Research Council has announced the 2016 Discovery Fund Synergy Awards and Innovation Awards. Established in 2014, these awards support new collaborative research projects and are meant to spark new synergistic interactions between investigators to generate scientific achievements of the highest quality and impact.

This year’s Synergy Awards projects aim to:

Develop badly needed minimally invasive screening technology for esophageal cancer and its precursor, Barrett’s esophagus, using DNA methylation as a marker — Steven Meltzer (school of medicine) and Jeff Wang (Whiting School of Engineering)

Evaluate a new sensitive and specific imaging biomarker in diagnosis and prognosis of neonatal hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy — Peiying Liu (school of medicine) and Andrea Poretti (school of medicine)

Develop an extended release scaffold for the local and sustained delivery of a drug to treat chronic diabetic wounds — Peter Abadir (school of medicine) and Honggang Cui (Whiting School of Engineering)

Validate the roles of the calcium/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II and O-GlcNAc transferase in diabetic cardiomyopathy to identify new therapeutic targets for metabolic heart disease — Mark Anderson (school of medicine) and Gerald Hart (school of medicine)

Develop new methods to visualize oligodendrocytes deep within the brain of living animals to assess dynamic changes in myelin during learning and thus cognitive recovery from disease or injury — Dwight Bergles (school of medicine) and Xingde Li (Whiting School of Engineering/school of medicine)

Evaluate the role of the claustrum in sensory selection (how we can focus in on one voice among many at a cocktail party, for example) by examining brain circuitry and recording from neurons in awake and active mice — Solange Brown (school of medicine) and Daniel O’Connor (school of medicine)

Develop drug-embedded biomaterials to enhance immunomodulation for vascularized composite allografts — Jennifer Elisseeff (school of medicine), Gerald Brandacher (school of medicine) and Drew Pardoll (school of medicine)
 

Improve clinical outcomes for gene editing correction of human diseases by enhancing precise genome editing in human cells by exploiting DNA repair mechanisms — Sonia Franco (school of medicine) and Linzhao Cheng (school of medicine)

This year’s Innovation Awards projects aim to:

Develop the first-ever animal model of sporadic inclusion body myositis by xenograft to better understand disease pathogenesis — Thomas Lloyd (school of medicine)

Design and evaluate a new e-Health-enabled psychological and physical rehabilitation intervention for acute respiratory failure survivors, who frequently experience post-intensive care syndrome — Dale Needham (school of medicine)

Characterize neuronal proteasome peptide products and the glycoproteins they interact with to activate receptors in a cell-specific manner — Seth Margolis (school of medicine)

Develop an effective and sustainable behavioral intervention to prevent rapid infant weight gain and subsequent childhood obesity — Sarah Polk (school of medicine)

Reverse the earliest pathological hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease by correcting a faulty protein in human-induced pluripotent stem cells — Rajini Rao (school of medicine)

Use point-of-care ultrasound devices to assess patients with congestive heart failure to determine whether those at risk for developing acute kidney injury can be identified — Tariq Shafi (school of medicine)

Analyze a novel enzymatic regulator of neuronal survival as a target in Alzheimer’s disease — Shanthini Sockanathan (school of medicine)

Develop new tools to manipulate lipid composition and to visualize lipids by the millisecond in cell membranes — Shigeki Watanabe (school of medicine)

Develop image-guided pre-targeting therapy for triple-negative breast cancer— Dmitri Artemov (school of medicine)

Use positron emission tomography to measure alpha7-nicotinic acetylcholine receptors in bipolar disorder type 1 patients to better understand the pathophysiology of BP1 — Jennifer Coughlin (school of medicine)

Determine the role of lymphocytes in post-natal brain development and adult anxiety — Shinichi Kano (school of medicine)

Target glutamine metabolism as a novel treatment for acute respiratory distress syndrome — Maureen Horton (school of medicine) and Rana Rais (school of medicine)