NIH Awards Genomic Center with $15M Grant

Harvard’s Bauer Center for Genomics Research (CGR) has netted a five-year, $15 million grant from one of the National Institutes of Health to investigate organisms’ molecular structure.

The grant, which was awarded by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) Monday, will endow a Center of Excellence in Complex Biomedical Systems Research. It is the first grant that the Bauer Center has won in its four-year history.

The money—approximately $1.2 million per year after administrative and overhead costs—will go to cover laboratory and research costs for the project, which will comprise about half of the center’s work, according to Bauer Center Director of Research Affairs Laura Garwin ’77. The center, which is composed of 10 fellows, has an annual operating budget of about $6 million, she said.

CGR’s research team, led by Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology Andrew W. Murray, who serves as the center’s director, will study “modular design” in living systems.

“The grant is dedicated to the notion that, like cars and computers, biology is organized into assemblies that are designed to perform specific functions and that these are then connected to each other,” Murray wrote in an e-mail. “We’ve set out on a variety of quests to test whether this idea is right.”

Describing himself as “over the moon” when he heard the first indications in early spring that CGR had won the grant, Murray now says he is “enormously excited” about the research. He will lead one of the eight individual projects that fall under the grant—dissecting and evolving the mating module of budding yeast.

Although Harvard researchers at the CGR will lead the project, they will collaborate with scientists elsewhere within the University as well as at Stanford, Caltech, the University of Calgary, Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel.

While the grant provides much-needed financial support, Garwin said it would not significantly alter the center’s work, as CGR researchers had already embarked on this project. Instead, she said, it will serve to cover the cost of the ongoing work, which to date had been largely supported by Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby through allocations of his discretionary funds.

“It’s really doing what we wanted to do anyway, and we’re fortunate that what we wanted to do is closely aligned with what the NIH wants people to do,” she said. “So it was a good match.”

Murray said the grant serves to reaffirm the center’s mission as one within a group of three major Harvard genomic initiatives. While it is a small interdisciplinary research center in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the University’s other efforts—the new $300 million Broad Institute and the Harvard-Partners Center for Genetics and Genomics—differ in structure and mission.

“This will certainly put a little more hot air in the balloon,” Murray said.

He also said the center is unique in seeking to merge biological theory with empirical results.

“Theory and experiment have been inextricably linked in physics, but in biology they have separated like oil and water,” he said in a press release.

In the grant proposal, CGR investigators emphasized the center’s unique structure. Indeed, Kirby said the receipt of the grant serves to recognize the center’s particular appeal in terms of diversity of study.

“This grant from NIH is gratifying not only in its generosity, but in its recognition of the particular merits and promise of the Bauer Center,” he said in the release. “That this hive of minds, creatively connected across the disciplines, can apply itself to the critical questions in biomedical research today, is encouraging for our future and a mark of our institutional commitment to scientific research more broadly.”

The grant to the Bauer center was given concurrently with another $16 million gift to MIT’s Computational and Systems Biology Initiative.

NIGMS has only awarded four grants: two last August to the University of Washington and Case Western Reserve University, and these two. The grants are awarded to further the study of biological patterns and data at a molecular level, NIGMS officials said.

—Staff writer Stephen M. Marks can be reached at marks@fas.harvard.edu.