Thirty-eight researchers were awarded with grants totaling $42.2 million dollars this week for their "wild and crazy " ideas to change the way science is done.

The EUREKA program (Exceptional, Unconventional Research Enabling Knowledge Acceleration), sought proposals from investigators that were innovative, but required little or no preliminary data.

"There were so many good [projects]," said Jeremy Berg, director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), the largest funder of the four NIH institutes participating. "We ended up funding more than we thought." The institute had set aside $5 million, but awarded nearly $6 million in grants.

A few of the winning projects:

Beverly Davidson from University of Iowa will engineer RNA aptamers to act as specific drug delivery agents to carry chemical payloads into the brain, a notoriously difficult drug target.

Akira Chiba, at the University of Miami, will investigate ways to stimulate neural regeneration by shaking things up, on the local level. Since researchers have seen mechanical force foster regeneration, Chiba's group propose using nanotechnology, bioengineering and genetics to restore neural connectivity in damaged areas of the brain via a mechanical instead of molecular approach.

Alexander Varshavsky from the California Institute of Technology will investigate a novel way of globally targeting cancer, by engineering a molecule that looks for the gaps, or deletions, in the genome. Cancer therapies targeting specific genes often fail because of ongoing genetic mutation in the cancer cell; additionally, current therapies have severe side effects because they don't target cancer cells exclusively, but also attack biologically similar healthy cells. Varshavksy proposes using a hallmark of cancer cells -- deletion mutations -- to specifically target the cancer.

Each project will receive up to $800,000 over four years. The program is already accepting applications for next year's round of awards; in 2009, nine of the 27 NIH institutes will participate, including NIGMS, rather than the four that participated this year.