Wound Healing Centers Get Boost

The National Institute of General Medical Sciences will award $13 million to four centers over four years, or up to $944,000 annually per center, to create innovative therapies for wound healing. The centers in total will include 36 investigators at eight universities and medical institutions and are aimed at drawing together interdisciplinary teams.

"A major goal is to set up a framework to establish larger centers in the future," says Gregg Semenza at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, one of the four center's principal investigators. "We want to encourage other scientists to get in touch with us, form collaborations, make proposals about projects related to the goal of each center, so for the next round, draw in more people who are looking at related problems."

The four centers each have a different focus. One, headed by Andrew Baird at the La Jolla Institute for Molecular Medicine in San Diego, Calif., (ciwhr@ljimm.org) is data-mining libraries of molecules to find ones to speed healing; Luisa DiPietro at the University of Illinois in Chicago (ldipiet@uic.edu) and her center are working on drugs to reduce scarring by studying fast-healing mucosal tissues; Semenza's center (gsemenza@jhmi.edu) is exploring recruiting stem cells against burn wounds; and Philip Stewart at Montana State University in Bozeman (phil_s@erc.montana.edu) and his colleagues are studying anti-biofilm treatments against chronic wounds.