Pictures of Dr. Agenor Limon, associate professor in the department of neurology, and Dr. Junki Maruyama, assistant professor in the department of pathology

UTMB investigators win Dunn Foundation Collaborative Research Award

The Gulf Coast Consortia recently named two University of Texas Medical Branch researchers recipients of the John S. Dunn Foundation Collaborative Research Award which supports research in the quantitative biomedical sciences with research seed grants.
 
Dr. Agenor Limon, associate professor of neurology at UTMB, and Dr. Junki Maruyama, assistant professor of pathology at UTMB, were honored for their collaborative work with other researchers in the Texas Medical Center. The Dunn awards seek to foster inter-disciplinary and inter-institutional engagement with funds to support research and preliminary work for two years.  

The Gulf Coast Consortia is an inter-institutional cooperative based in the Texas Medical Center with a focus on building collaborative research groups and interdisciplinary training opportunities.
 
Limon and Dr. Gabriel Fries, a researcher in psychiatry and behavioral sciences at UTHealth Houston, were recognized for their project, “Exploring excitatory to inhibitory synaptic ration as a novel target in bipolar disorder and suicide.”
 
“Interdisciplinary research across different institutions allows us to do research that otherwise would be extremely difficult to do by a single group,” Limon said. “This collaboration with Dr. Fries at UT Science Health will facilitate the study of functional brain alterations that can have large implications for diagnostics and potential treatments in mental health disorders.”
 
Maruyama and Dr. Waldemar Priebe, a researcher in experimental therapeutics at MD Anderson, were recognized for their project, “Antiviral effect of monosaccharide analog against highly pathogenic RNA viruses.”
 
“This intersectional collaboration will accelerate the development of novel antivirals and countermeasures against viral infections for which there is no approved antiviral therapy,” Maruyama said.  
 
In addition to being inter-disciplinary and inter-institutional, teams must be new collaborators, and funded projects must have potential for impacting human health, according to the Gulf Coast Consortia.

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