Muro Group Receives Funding for Developing Therapeutic Strategies for Neurodegenerative Conditions

Dr. Silvia Muro, Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology Research (IBBR) and the Fischell Department of Bioengineering, has been awarded funding to explore several therapeutic approaches using specific drug delivery platforms that have been developed in her lab. Dr. Muro’s project funding is through a collaboration with the NIH Chemical Genomics Center (NCGC) and the contract is associated with the NIH program for Therapeutics for Rare and Neglected Diseases (http://nctt.nih.gov/trnd/). NCGC, a component of the NIH Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, was created in 2008 with the goal of translating discoveries from the Human Genome Project into new therapeutics for human disease. NCGC creates a drug development pipeline within the NIH and is specifically intended to stimulate research collaborations with academic scientists, non-profit organizations, and pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies that produce outcomes and deliverables. NCGC uses a solicitation application and evaluation process to select collaborators and Dr. Muro’s proposal was selected for funding through this mechanism.

The research that Dr. Muro’s group will pursue with the NCGC funding is a multi-pronged project. The work will combine the platform Dr. Muro’s lab has developed for crossing the blood-brain barrier with a number of new therapeutic agents identified by her NCGC collaborators. The goal of the joint research is to achieve transport of these agents derived at NCGC from the circulation into the brain. The main emphasis will be on developing therapeutic strategies for neurodegenerative conditions, including Alzheimer’s disease and genetic lysosomal storage disorders.

Dr. Muro’s laboratory focuses mainly on mechanisms of endocytic vesicular transport, including their role in physiology and disease and their translational application for the controlled delivery of nano-scale therapeutics. The research is sponsored by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the American Heart Association.