Biotech Partnership Awards Millions for Mesothelioma Research
DULUTH, Minnesota – On the heels of requests from University of Minnesota Duluth for mesothelioma research funding comes an announcement that the Minnesota Partnership for Biotechnology and Medical Genomics will award nearly $6 million to seven teams doing research on mesothelioma, epilepsy, infection prevention and heart disease.
The Minnesota Partnership for Biotechnology and Medical Genomics is a collaborating among the University of Minnesota, the state of Minnesota and the Mayo Clinic. In addition to funding research into the causes and risk factors for mesothelioma, the partnership will also be helping to fund projects in nanotechnology and human-safe pesticides designed for use in Minnesota.
Dr. Mark Paller, the program director for the partnership at the University of Minnesota, said that the new awards show the Partnership’s focus on providing funding for research on major diseases that affect residents of Minnesota, and that offer innovative biotech ideas that can have a wide application on a variety of health issues.
At the Mayo Clinic, the partnership’s program director, Dr. Eric Wieben will be focusing on ways to use biotechnology and nanotechnology to do analysis, and on ways to make the state’s environment healthier by finding pest control methods that don’t rely on toxic chemicals.
The goal of the funding is to develop intellectual property that can attract additional research support from federal and private sources. The current round of funding will run for two years.
Among the major foci of the partnership will be research on mesothelioma, a deadly cancer that is caused by asbestos. There are several Minnesota research projects underway which aim to understand the causes and mechanics of mesothelioma. The basis of the currently proposed research is a report released by the Minnesota Department of Health in November. That report identified 85 mesothelioma deaths among miners in the state’s Iron Belt. By studying the details of those miners’ histories, and collating it with information about other miners who did not develop the disease despite seemingly similar exposures, researchers hope to illuminate more about how mesothelioma develops, and from there, work towards prevention and cure.
The projects that will be funded by the partnership were selected by a national panel of experts who considered the possible commercial applications of the research. Commercial applications will encourage further development beyond the funding period. Because mesothelioma is a rare condition, few major corporations have been willing to develop treatments that would target the cancer. In past months, however, there have been a number of announcements regarding research grants for research into mesothelioma, including the inclusion of mesothelioma on the list of approved conditions for Department of Defense funding.
