New HHMI Collaborative Innovation Award to Jackson Professor Simon John
| Date: November 20, 2008 | 
|
As part of a new, $40 million initiative to spark innovation and collaboration in biomedical research, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) has named Jackson Professor Simon John to lead one of eight teams of scientists. Dr. John is one of the nation's leading researchers in the study of glaucoma.
According to HHMI, the Collaborative Innovation Awards were designed to enable the teams "to devote substantial time and energy to pursuing collaborative, transformative research." In Dr. John's case, he will be teaming with engineers at Purdue University to develop new, wireless sensor technology to monitor the intraocular pressure of a mouse eye. If successful, the technology could have a wide range of applications in human medicine, such as monitoring blood pressure around the clock.
In glaucoma, the nerve cells, or neurons, that connect the eye to the brain lose function and die. These nerve cells are known as retinal ganglion cells. Since retinal ganglion cell axons -- similar to electrical wires -- travel through the optic nerve and connect the retinal ganglion cells to the brain, glaucoma is also characterized by degeneration of the optic nerve. Most currently available treatments for glaucoma focus on reducing harmfully high pressure inside the eye (known as intraocular pressure), one of the strongest known contributing factors to glaucoma. The ability to closely monitor the pressure is an important step in fully understanding the disease and how it progresses to damage neurons.
Like the other seven team leaders in the Collaborative Innovation Awards Program, Dr. John holds the prestigious title of Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, a designation granted to the nation's most innovative researchers. In August he was awarded a $1.25 million grant from the Partridge Foundation to pursue a new approach to glaucoma therapy, and a $100,000 Alcon Research Institute grant recognizing excellence in vision research.
The Jackson Laboratory is an independent, nonprofit biomedical research institution and National Cancer Institute-designated Cancer Center based in Bar Harbor, Maine, with a facility in Sacramento, California. Its mission is to discover the genetic basis for preventing, treating and curing human diseases, and to enable research and education for the global biomedical community. The Laboratory is the world's source for more than 4,000 strains of genetically defined mice, is home of the mouse genome database and is an international hub for scientific courses, conferences, training and education.
# # #
Read a detailed description of Dr. John's Collaborative Innovation Award research project
Read about Dr. John and the other Collaborative Innovation Award team leaders
Read the HHMI news release on the Collaborative Innovation Awards
Visit Dr. John's research page
Other recent news about Dr. John:
Jackson eye researcher Simon John awarded $100k Alcon Research Institute grant
Partridge Foundation grants $1.25M to Jackson scientist for promising glaucoma research
Contact(s): Joyce Peterson, 207-288-6058
For information on automatic email delivery of news releases (journalists only), please send an email request for details to news@jax.org. Please address other inquiries to pubinfo@jax.org.
Media Relations, Communications Office
The Jackson Laboratory
600 Main Street
Bar Harbor, Maine 04609-1500
Phone: 207-288-6058 (journalists only)
Main Jackson Laboratory phone: 207-288-6000
Fax: 207-288-6076
Email: news@jax.org
