Focus
Focus on Development and Disease
- Focus issue:
- September 2007 Volume 9, No 9
Sponsors' Foreword
In 1938, alarmed by decades of worsening polio epidemics, President Franklin D. Roosevelt - himself a victim of the disease - established the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. The agency's fundraising campaign, dubbed the "March of Dimes," asked every American to contribute a dime (ten-cent piece) to fight polio. Eventually, the entire organization adopted the name of its fundraising phenomenon. After supporting the development of effective polio vaccines, the March of Dimes shifted its mission to improving the health of babies by preventing birth defects, premature birth, and infant mortality.
Before and after this change, the organization provided seed money for major contributions to every aspect of genetic science. Current March of Dimes research grants support study of epigenetic mechanisms in such varied contexts as adverse birth outcomes after certain fertility treatments; placental insufficiency and intrauterine growth restriction; multi-system birth defects such as the Angelman, Beckwith-Wiedemann, Prader-Willi and Silver-Russell syndromes; and fetal origins of adult disorders such as obesity, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease. Today the March of Dimes funds approximately $29 million in research annually, helping to support some 130 scientists in the United States, Canada, and nine other countries.
www.marchofdimes.com
Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology (IBCB), Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences was formed in April 2000 by merging of the former Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry and Shanghai Institute of Cell Biology. IBCB is one of the leading life-science research institutions in China, and is well-known for its scientific achievements, such as the total synthesis of crystalline bovine insulin in 1965, the total synthesis of yeast alanine tRNA in 1981, and the artificial propagation of domestic fresh-water fish and artificial monogenesis of oocytes in the 1960s.
The objective of IBCB is to study basic research relevant to human health, focusing on biochemistry, molecular biology and cell biology. IBCB has over 700 staff and 50 independent research groups. In the past seven years, IBCB researchers published over 900 papers in SCI listed journals, of which over 30 articles were in journals including Science, Cell, Molecular Cell, Cancer Cell, Developmental Cell, Nature Cell Biology, Nature Medicine, Nature Immunology, Nature Genetics, PNAS, EMBO J, and J Cell Biology. Among the research fields emphasized by IBCB are epigenetics, cell signaling and stem cell biology, and the institute aims to strengthen its research through international collaboration and principal investigators recruitment.
Guangzhou Institute of Biomedicine and Health (GIBH) is a newly established non-profit research institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Our mission is to identify disease mechanisms and discover novel therapeutics in infectious diseases, cancer, metabolic diseases and cardiovascular diseases.
Currently, we are seeking individuals with expertise in: 1) virology; 2) vaccine research and development; 3) molecular immunology; 4) antibody and protein engineering; 5) pharmacology and toxicology; 6) animal disease models especially non-human primates; 7) stem cell biology and gene therapy; 8) medicinal chemistry; 9) natural drug discovery and modernization of TCM; 10) structure biology and rational drug design.
GIBH also welcomes collaborations with pharmaceutical companies and other related research institutions. For more information, please visit our website: www.gibh.ac.cn.
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