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The University of Massachusetts Medical Center reports it has landed $6 million from the National Institutes of Health for research on RNA interference (RNAi) technology.
Under the five-year grant, UMass Medical researchers will attempt to quantify and control the delivery, distribution and efficiency of short pieces of RNA to suppress the genes in immune cells responsible for insulin resistance and inflammation associated with type 2 diabetes.
RNAi was developed as a gene-silencing technique in 1998 by UMass researcher Craig Mello and his colleagues. The team won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Medicine for the discovery.
The grant is a NIH Director’s Transformative RO1 (t-RO1) Award. The NIH has granted a total of $30 million through 42 t-RO1 awards in fiscal 2009, according to UMass. No budget cap is imposed on the research teams, and preliminary results are not required. The awards are intended to allow scientists to freely propose innovative ideas that may require significant resources to pursue. The NIH also gives the researchers flexibility to work in large teams.
Also announced today, UMass Medical School won approval for $90 million in capital funding from the Massachusetts Life Science Center board of directors to apply to the construction of a $405 million project at the Umass Medical School.
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