St. Jude Children's Research Hospital has committed close to $13 million toward a new research collaboration with scientists at Duke University, Columbia University, and Stanford University.
It's the first tranche of a $160 million increase toward new research collaborations as part of the St. Jude Strategic Plan 2022-27. To date, the St. Jude Research Collaboratives program has funded six separate projects, totaling over $80 million since 2017 when the initiative launched.
“The St. Jude Research Collaboratives are designed to focus on problems with the greatest potential to transform understanding of the pediatric catastrophic diseases we treat,” said Dr. Charles Roberts, Ph.D., EVP and director of the St. Jude Comprehensive Cancer Center, which developed and oversees the program. “The scientific progress we have seen to date across the collaboratives has been remarkable, and we are looking forward to exceptional advances with the addition of the GPCR team.”
To form a research collaborative, St. Jude principal investigators propose a project, then put together team members from other institutions. St. Jude funds approved projects that assist in addressing challenges in treating pediatric cancers and other catastrophic diseases.
“We understand that a team-oriented approach can increase the speed of research progress,” said St. Jude president and CEO Dr. James Downing, a news release. “The complexities of pediatric cancers and other life-threatening diseases demand collaboration among the best minds in their respective fields.”
The new collaboration will be led by two St. Jude researchers: Scott Blanchard, Ph.D., and M. Madan Babu, Ph.D. Joining them is Duke University's Dr. Robert Lefkowitz, who is a Nobel laureate and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator; Columbia University's Dr. Jonathan Javitch, Ph.D.; and Stanford University's Georgios Skiniotis, Ph.D., and Alice Ting, Ph.D.
The group aims to more fully understand G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCR) — vital proteins that impact human health and disease. Over 100 human diseases and disorders have a link to GPCRs.
"The GPCR Collaborative will use advanced methodologies, including time-resolved, single-molecule imaging, cryo-electron microscopy, proximity labeling, data science, and other techniques to develop new strategies to treat a number of catastrophic pediatric diseases, including cancer," the release from St. Jude states. "These approaches could lead to the development of better GPCR-targeting drugs."
In the past, research collaborations with St. Jude have included Princeton University; Washington University in St. Louis; Dana-Farber Cancer Institute; the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard; Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research of MIT; Boston Children’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School; Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia; NIH/National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute; State University of New York at Buffalo; The Rockefeller University; University of Pennsylvania; and Massachusetts General Hospital.
“Ordinarily, there are few opportunities for teams from different institutions to come together for collaboration,” said Blanchard in the release. "Here, we’re bringing together our individual unique innovations and expertise so we can understand the mechanism by which GPCRs operate with the ultimate goal of using this information to identify and design more effective drugs."
