The ALSAM Foundation, a generous long-time donor to the CU Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences (SSPPS), has provided $2M of funding for collaborative grants between the SSPPS and the BioFrontiers Institute. This donation supports the Therapeutic Innovation Grants Program that allows the SSPPS on the Anschutz Medical Campus to join forces with the BioFrontiers Institute on the Boulder Campus to encourage faculty collaboration in the development of innovative projects that will advance the health and wellness of people in our communities and around the globe.
“The ALSAM Foundation has been a transformative force for the SSPPS and for advancing therapeutic innovations through two therapeutic innovations research grant programs totaling over $5M in the past three years. We are enormously grateful to the Foundation for its continuing support and look forward to the outcomes of these multidisciplinary research projects that promise new insights into diseases with the goal of developing new therapeutics,” says SSPPS Dean Ralph Altiere.
Tom Cech, Director of the BioFrontiers Institute at CU Boulder adds, “This program will stimulate our BioFrontiers faculty and students to work with our SSPPS colleagues at Anschutz to develop new therapeutics in the areas of cancer, muscle disease and diabetes.”
The Therapeutic Innovation Grants Program will foster cross-disciplinary collaboration among pharmaceutical researchers at the SSPPS and the interdisciplinary bioscientists at the BioFrontiers Institute with the goal of transforming the development of a new generation of drugs by fueling discovery and translation of new therapeutics to the clinic to achieve better health outcomes for patients and families. The funded projects will address this goal by facilitating the collaboration of the best scientific and clinical research minds in Colorado in a manner that allows rapid testing of new ideas and approaches. This year’s Therapeutic Innovation Grants Program proposals included faculty from University of Colorado entities including SSPPS, BioFrontiers Institute, School of Medicine (SOM) and School of Public Health (SPH).
The newly funded projects address critical health issues related to cancer, vaccine design, diabetes, depression and alcoholism among others. The newly funded research partnerships aim to advance discoveries from the laboratory to the clinic.
Principle Investigator | Collaborating Investigators
Natalie Ahn (BioFrontiers) | Nichole Reisdorph (SSPPS)
Jared Brown (SSPPS) | Tom Flaig (SOM), Myles Cockburn (SPH), John Adgate (SPH)
Carlos Catalano (SSPPS) | Robert Garcea (BioFrontiers), Ted Randolph (UCB)
Shaodong Dai (SSPPS) | Aaron Michels (SOM)
Dan LaBarbera (SSPPS) | Terry Fry (SOM)
Bradley Olwin (BioFrontiers) | Nichole Reisdorph (SSPPS)
Amy Palmer (BioFrontiers) | Raj Agarwal (SSPPS)
Manisha Patel (SSPPS) | Diego Restrepo (SOM), Emily Gibson (SOM)
Nichole Reisdorph (SSPPS) | Kristine Kuhn (SOM), Cathy Lozupone (SOM)
Michael Wempe (SSPPS) | Richard Johnson (SOM), B Vogeli (SOM)
