Mizzou Receives $8.6M Grant for New Research Center
Date Posted: June 28, 2019
Posted In: Projects,
From St. Louis Business Journal: The University of Missouri-Columbia received an $8.6 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to establish a new national research center, called the Swine Somatic Cell Genome Editing Center, which will focus on aiding the development of biomedical treatments for diseases like cystic fibrosis.
“As new gene-editing tools come down the pipeline, this center will develop more efficient processes to apply them to disease treatments,” Kevin Wells, co-lead researcher on the grant and a professor at Mizzou, said in a statement. “The first two years will focus on developing standard operating procedures and testing the efficacy of those procedures. When that is done, we will start applying those procedures to promising new therapies.”
The center will create protocols to evaluate the safety and efficacy of reagents, or tools researchers use to edit and repair disease-related genes, officials said. The center’s mission also aligns with Mizzou Chancellor Alexander Cartwright’s precision medicine initiative, which hopes to double research funding, develop new projects and add three to five national, externally funded centers by 2023.