McKNIGHT AWARDS $1.2 MILLION FOR STUDY OF BRAIN DISORDERS
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE (Minneapolis, December 15, 2014)-The McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience has selected four projects to receive the 2015 Memory and Cognitive Disorders Awards. The awards will total $1.2 million over three years for research on the biology of brain diseases, with each project receiving $300,000 between 2015 and 2017.
The Memory and Cognitive Disorders Awards support innovative research by U.S. scientists who are studying neurological and psychiatric diseases, especially those related to memory and cognition. The awards encourage collaboration between basic and clinical neuroscience to translate laboratory discoveries about the brain and nervous system into diagnoses and therapies to improve human health.
The awards will support studies of genes and areas of the brain involved in neurological disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia.
“Neurological diseases affect a vast segment of our aging population, including not only patients, but also their families and friends,” said Wendy Suzuki, PhD, chair of the awards committee and professor at New York University Center for Neural Science. “The long-term goal of these awards is to alleviate human suffering by thoroughly understanding the root causes of these diseases so that new clinical therapies can follow.”
The awards are inspired by the interests of William L. McKnight, who founded The McKnight Foundation in 1953 and wanted to support research on diseases affecting memory. His daughter, Virginia McKnight Binger, and The McKnight Foundation board established the McKnight neuroscience program in his honor in 1977.
Up to four awards are given each year. This year’s awardees are:
* Jacqueline Gottlieb, PhD, Columbia UniversityPopulation dynamics encoding uncertainty and reward in the fronto parietal cortex
* Michael Greicius, MD, MPH, Stanford University
Elucidating the interaction between sex and APOE on Alzheimer’s disease risk
* Stephen Maren, PhD, Texas A&M University
Prefrontal-hippocampal interplay in contextual memory retrieval
* Philip Wong, PhD, and Liam Chen, MD, PhD, Johns Hopkins University
Characterization and validation of a new therapeutic target in TDP-43 animal models of frontotemporal dementia
With 170 letters of intent received this year, the awards are highly competitive. A committee of distinguished scientists reviews the letters and invites a select few researchers to submit full proposals. In addition to Suzuki, the committee includes Robert Edwards, MD, University of California, San Francisco; Howard Eichenbaum, PhD, Boston University; Rob Malenka, MD, PhD, Stanford University; Helen S. Mayberg, MD, Emory University; Rich O’Brien, MD, PhD, Duke University; Steven E. Petersen, PhD, Washington University in St. Louis; and Matthew Shapiro, PhD, Mount Sinai School of Medicine.
Letters of intent for the 2016 awards are due by April 1, 2015. For more information, see www.mcknight.org/neuroscience/.
ABOUT THE McKNIGHT ENDOWMENT FUND FOR NEUROSCIENCE
The McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience is an independent organization funded solely by The McKnight Foundation of Minneapolis, Minnesota, and led by a board of prominent neuroscientists from around the country. The McKnight Foundation has supported neuroscience research since 1977. The foundation established the Endowment Fund in 1986 to carry out one of the intentions of founder William L. McKnight (1887-1978). One of the early leaders of the 3M Company, he had a personal interest in memory and its diseases.
The Endowment Fund makes three types of awards each year. In addition to the Memory and Cognitive Disorders Awards, they are the McKnight Technological Innovations in Neuroscience Awards, providing seed money to develop technical inventions to advance brain research; and the McKnight Scholar Awards, supporting neuroscientists in the early stages of their research careers.
Project Descriptions
Philip Wong, PhD, Professor of Pathology and Neuroscience, and Liam Chen, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor of Pathology, Johns Hopkins University
Characterization and validation of a new therapeutic target in TDP-43 animal models of frontotemporal dementia
Frontotemporal dementia (FTD), a group of complex disorders resulting from neurodegeneration of the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain, is second only to Alzheimer’s as a form of dementia affecting people under age 65. It changes a person’s character, behavior and speech. Wong and Chen are working to fill a gap in the ability to treat these diseases. Current therapeutics manage symptoms but do not address the root cause. Based on previous studies in mice and fruit flies, they hypothesize that loss of function of a particular protein, TDP-43, is involved. TDP-43 potentially could regulate a wide variety of molecular targets that are relevant in memory loss and cognitive decline in FTD. Their lab will perform drug screening in fruit flies to discover leads that can be used to determine potential targets for drug development for this disorder. Positive outcomes of these studies would hold promise for other neurological disorders associated with TDP-43 as well.