Med School Nets $30M in Grants for Pharmacology Research

The Harvard Program in Therapeutic Science at the Medical School was recently awarded $30 million in funding from government agencies in response to proposals from the program’s principal researchers.

The funding comes from three government agencies—The National Institutes of Health, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and from the Food and Drug Administration.

HiTS, originally funded by a grant from the state of Massachusetts, is home to the Laboratory of Systems Pharmacology, a space which currently houses undergraduate, graduate, and professional researchers, according to Laura E. Maliszewski, executive director of the lab.

HiTS studies diseases and toxins on a cellular level, aiming to understand bodily responses in an effort to prove what type of medicine would make for a more effective drug.

The $3.4 million given by the FDA will be used first to examine the reaction of heart cells to various processes, but researchers will later experiment with kidney and liver cells as well.

Peter Sorger ’83, head of the Harvard Program in Therapeutic Science, used the example of breast cancer research leading to developments in prostate cancer research to explain how targeted research on one disease or part of the body often leads to a greater understanding of similar cancers or abnormalities.

In this vein, Sorger said these recent grants were as important for “basic research” as for “applied research,” meaning they are meant to explore general questions about how biology works, in addition to targeting specific diseases.

One of the NIH grants will be dedicated toward a better understanding of diseased states in cancer cells.

“We take as many cells as we can, we treat them with as many things as we can, and then we measure as much as we can,” Maliszewski said, explaining the far reaches of the research.

Additionally, Sorger said that all collected data will be open source, meaning it can be accessed for free.

“Our fundamental belief,” he said, “is that universities work in service of the general public.”

The second NIH grant will be used for increased communication with other universities and research centers, training, community outreach, and other programmatic functions, according to Maliszewski. This opens up opportunities for HiTS to fund the involvement of more postdoctoral students in their projects.

Sorger explained the program’s dedication to “bench to bedside” style research, also known as translational research that connects work done on research benches with a patient’s experience. HiTS aims to close the gap between laboratory research and clinical effects by hiring both researchers and practicing doctors. The Laboratory of Systems Pharmacology is located on campus to help bridge the two sides of the pharmacology process.

“You want to take an idea from a lab as quickly as possible and see if it is meaningful for people,” Sorger said. “Our job is not to build a barrier between the little things in cells and the big things in people, but exactly the opposite, namely to break those barriers down.”

Some of the grant money will be used to increase the clinical side of HiTS’s translational mission. The Laboratory of Systems Pharmacology will ultimately dedicate part of its building to patient-focused doctors, in addition to the research facilities it currently houses, according to Sorger.

—Staff writer Caroline C. Hunsicker can be reached at caroline.hunsicker@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @cchunsicker.