This is a sample of the kinds of projects supported by the funders of Partnership for Cures.

Children's Medical Center of Dallas, University of Texas Southwestern - Type I Diabetes, $25,000

Barjor Gimi, PhD, "3d Microdevices for Diabetes Therapy"

New device development designed to create tiny islands of insulin-producing cells protected from the immune response by micro-cages. (1 year)

Harvard University Medical School - Type I Diabetes, $180,000

Denise Faustman, MD, PhD, "Screening for Compounds to Kill Naïve Diabetic Cells: Alternative to MHC Class I and Self-Peptide"

Dr. Faustman's lab found one generic drug that destroys one of the rouge immune cells that causes diabetes. They found a series of candidate second generic drugs that can be repurposed to kill the other immune cells that auto-destroy insulin producing cells in the pancreas. (1.5 years)

Massachusetts General - Lung Cancer, $187,000

Sreeneth Sharma, PhD, "Chemo-sensitizing Non Small Cell Lung Cancer to Overcome Resistance to Gefitinib & Erlotinib"

Repurpose Chloroquine to overcome resistance to new front line therapies Iressa and Tarceva so that these new drugs can be re-used for lung cancer patients after the treatment has stopped working. (2 years)

University of Massachusetts - White blood cell diseases, $25,000

Janice Telfer, PhD, "Expanding Adult Hematopoietic Stem Cells While Maintaining Self-Renewal and Multi-Potency"

Stem cell transplants often fail because there are not enough stem cells to transplant, and destroying the patient's immune system is very dangerous. This research team has found a drug that can cause blood stem cells to grow in numbers after they are collected, so there will be sufficient numbers to transplant. Exposure to this drug seems to make these stem cells so strong they can be transplanted back into the patient without having to first destroy the immune system. (1 year)

University of Pittsburgh - Breast Cancer, $25,000

Jeffrey L. Brodsky, PhD "Targeting the Heel of Achilles in Breast Cancer"

New drug development project focused on a specific pathway in the development of breast cancer. (1 year)

Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research - All diseases, $25,000

Anne Carpenter, PhD, "Testing for Drug Targets in Realistic Cell Environments"

This research team aims to create a flexible, ultrathin "slide" that could be implanted inside a mouse to test which genes cause disease and which genes can reverse the disease. Beginning drug discovery efforts in a living animal rather than a test tube could speed up drug discovery and cut early development costs by 25% or more. (2 years)