Travelling Fellowships
Disease Models & Mechanisms’ (DMM) mission is to facilitate clinically meaningful research. This includes providing fellowships of up to US $5000/£2500 to graduate students and post-docs wishing to make collaborative visits to other laboratories in the interest of medical research.
Here are some examples of what DMM Travelling Fellowship awardees are doing…
Working towards an anti-malaria vaccine
Malaria causes more than 300 million clinical cases of malaria and more than 1 million deaths annually. A basic understanding of the mechanisms involved in the induction of protective immune responses should help in the development of an effective vaccine against the parasite. Using attenuated parasites in a rodent model of infection, Eva Morath at the University of Würzburg in Germany is identifying and characterizing new vaccine candidates. Her work includes describing how anti-parasite mechanisms are regulated during infection and vaccination. Her DMM fellowship has exposed her to new concepts and techniques at the London School for Hygiene & Tropical Medicine in the UK.
Uncovering the mechanisms of bone disease
Skeletal remodeling requires the activity of osteoclasts, which are responsible for the resorption of old bone and bone remodeling. However, excessive osteoclast activity is implicated in diseases such as osteoporosis and bone cancers. Understanding osteoclast development is therefore crucial to understanding these debilitating pathologies. Alexander Barrow at the University of Cambridge in the UK is investigating the ligands for stimulatory osteoclast receptors that augment osteoclast development and function. DMM recently funded his temporary Postdoctoral Research Scholar position at the University of Washington in the USA to expand his expertise in transgenic mouse models of bone disease.
Research Presentation Grants
DMM is delighted to announce the launch of a new initiative designed to help our authors present their work at conferences and meetings. Research Presentation Grants to the value of $1000/£500 are available for all first-named authors of accepted manuscripts approved for publication before the end of 2008. The grants are intended as a contribution towards travel and other expenses incurred by the author in attending a meeting of their choice to deliver a presentation or poster based on their published research. We are already beginning to receive positive feedback from recipients of the first grants.
For example, Néstor Oviedo, at the Forsyth Health Foundation in the USA, is an author in this issue of DMM and the first recipient of this award. DMM will support his presentation of the data published here, showing the regulation of adult stem cells during tissue regeneration and homeostasis. He uses the model organism Schmidtea mediterranea, a planarian that is becoming very popular for its extraordinary regenerative capacity and accessible adult stem cell population. He and his colleagues have determined that the highly conserved PI3K-AKT-TOR pathway is capable of regulating adult somatic stem cells in vivo.
