NCRR Provides $33M for High-End Instrument Grants at Multiple Universities

[Source: a GenomeWeb staff reporter, GenomeWeb News] - The National Institutes of Health has provided 20 research institutes with a total of $33 million to buy new mass spectrometers and other relatively expensive biomedical research technologies through its National Center for Research Resources.

These High-End Instrumentation grants are aimed at helping researchers buy tools costing over $750,000, and NCRR provides up to a total of $2 million per award.

Among the grants announced today, the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston will use its $2 million award to purchase a secondary ion mass spectrometer for quantitative intracellular stable isotope imaging.

Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., will use its $2 million award to buy a large memory cluster computer at the Institute for Computational Medicine to speed creation and use of computational models and algorithms for disease diagnosis and treatment.

The State University of New York Stony Brook received $851,000 to buy an orbital trap mass spectrometer for use in finding and characterizing proteins and novel diagnostic biomarkers.

The Translational Genomics Research Institute in Phoenix, Ariz., will use its $2 million award to buy supercomputing equipment for translational research aimed at identifying biomarkers for several common diseases.

The University of Minnesota will use its $1.2 million award to buy an automated, high-throughput nanoliter crystallization platform for making crystals from purified protein complexes in studies of Alzheimer’s and other diseases.

The University of Wisconsin – Madison has been awarded $1.7 million to purchase a liquid chromatography, mass spectrometry, and nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer that it plans to use in metabolic profiling, biomarker discovery, and studies of molecular interactions.

Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. will use $988,000 to buy a robotic storage and distribution system for a large-scale biobank that will enable exploration of genotype-phenotype relations involved in a range of diseases.

Washington State University in Pullman, Wash., will use the $990,000 award to purchase a high-throughput Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometer and automated liquid chromatography system for research into protein synthesis.

Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., will use $1.9 million to buy a Fourier transform mass spectrometer for use in researching biomedical conditions. The instrument will be housed in the university’s Resource for Biomedical and Bio-Organic Mass Spectrometry, where it will support research at the Institute of Clinical and Translational Sciences.