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Washington Research Foundation provides $600,000 to support research by clinician-scientists at the University of Washington

The newly created program, WRF-Weill Clinician-Scientist Fellows (CSF) in Neuroscience, will provide funding and resources to four UW researchers pursuing novel diagnostics and treatments for patients

Seattle, WA – October 29, 2024

Washington Research Foundation (WRF) has provided $600,000 in new program funding to the University of Washington (UW) to support research by early-career clinician-scientists that could benefit patients suffering from diseases of the nervous system. The award will enable the first cohort of Fellows, Samuel Emerson, M.D., Ph.D., Juliane Gust, M.D., Ph.D., Rebecca Hendrickson, M.D., Ph.D., and Monica Sanchez-Contreras, M.D., Ph.D., to develop novel diagnostics and therapeutics while collaborating with colleagues in a parallel program at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) funded by the Weill Neurohub.

The Weill Neurohub, which aims to accelerate the development of new treatments for neurological and psychiatric diseases, is further providing up to $100,000 to support undergraduate or postbaccalaureate researchers assisting the UW-based Fellows with their projects.

The WRF-Weill Clinician-Scientist Fellowship (CSF) in Neuroscience was created to address the time and funding pressures faced by many clinicians who conduct translational research that has the potential to directly lead to patient benefit. These obstacles routinely lead innovative clinicians to have to abandon promising research. Candidates for the CSF were nominated by their department chairs prior to final selection by a panel including several of UW’s vice chairs of research. UW will safeguard a portion of the Fellows’ time to accommodate their research activities, and the award of $150,000 per Fellow will enable them to work toward their project goals over the next two years. The inaugural cohort of UW Fellows hails from four different clinical departments that work in the neurosciences together. These young researchers are:

  • Samuel Emerson, M.D., Ph.D., will be working on Personalized Cerebral Organoids as Patient Avatars for Glioblastoma for Drug Discovery in UW Medicine’s Neurosurgery Department, growing organoids from patient tumor tissue as a rapid method to test brain tumor treatment susceptibility and personalize individual patient care.
  • Juliane Gust, M.D., Ph.D., from the Department of Neurology will be investigating Is Skull-meningeal Trafficking Required for CAR T Cell Efficacy Against Brain Tumors? with the goal of uncovering the activation factors required for CAR-T cells to be able to access brain tissue and more effectively clear tumors.
  • Rebecca Hendrickson, M.D., Ph.D., will be exploring Increased Adrenergic Signaling as a Common Mechanism for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Altered Cardiovascular Regulation following Traumatic Stress in the UW Medicine Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences to provide new, objective measures for PTSD symptoms and use them to assess treatment response and adjunct therapy options.
  • Monica Sanchez-Contreras, M.D., Ph.D., will be investigating Somatic mtDNA Mutations as Early Biomarkers of AD [Alzheimer’s disease] and PD [Parkinson’s disease] in the Neuropathology Division of the UW Medicine Department of Laboratory Medicine & Pathology, to offer a new way to diagnose and track neurodegenerative disease in the peripheral blood.

The UW-based Fellows will collaborate with their UCSF colleagues in the year ahead. The combined group of Fellows will additionally benefit from mentorship and training that focuses on translating academic research into real-world products and services for public benefit.

Bay Leslie-Mazwi, M.D., professor and chair of the UW Department of Neurology, and the director for the new fellowship program, said, “The bedside acumen of our Clinician Scientists means they identify clinical problems of the greatest significance, and that they see the shortest path to impact of new therapies. The generosity of the WRF is crucial to supporting our existing faculty, and I am so excited to see what they do with it, and how the opportunity grows.”

WRF’s director of grant programs, Meher Antia, Ph.D, said, “The benefits of clinicians being involved in translational research are widely acknowledged due to their first-hand knowledge of unmet needs in clinical care. Giving these clinicians protected time to dedicate to research is incredibly important, particularly early in their careers, and WRF is delighted to help support them in their efforts to bring innovations to patients.”

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About Washington Research Foundation

Washington Research Foundation (WRF) supports research and scholarship in Washington state, with a focus on life sciences and enabling technologies.

WRF was founded in 1981 to assist universities and other nonprofit research institutions in Washington with the commercialization and licensing of their technologies. WRF is one of the foremost technology transfer and grant-making organizations in the nation, having earned more than $445 million in licensing revenue for the University of Washington and providing over $160 million in grants to the state’s research institutions to date.

WRF Capital, the investment vehicle for Washington Research Foundation, has backed 132 local startups since 1996. Returns support the Foundation’s investment and grantmaking programs.

For additional information, please visit wrfseattle.org.