The US National Institute of General Medical Sciences, in Bethesda, Maryland, has awarded three 5-year, approximately US$9 million grants to map how embryonic stem cells become more specialized and figure out what sends them down the path of differentiation.

The programs will be led by Stephen Dalton at the University of Georgia, James Thomson at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Jerome Zack at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The Georgia group will focus on diabetes and heart disease, according to the Atlanta Business Chronicle .

The Wisconsin group will hunt for switches between pluripotency and self-renewal. It will study proteins that regulate gene expression and will use mass spectrometry to track chemical changes during development. It will also work on ways to mass-produce cells.

Besides developing better tools for monitoring gene activity in embryonic stem (ES) cells, the Los Angeles group will study how gene activity changes as stem cells differentiate or persist in culture.

At a rate of about of about $5.4 million a year for the three grants combined, this sum is a significant fraction of the estimated $41 million a year that the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda, Maryland, plans to spend on human ES cells. (The total estimated for stem cell research is $655 million; the NIH invests more than $28 billion a year in medical research, according to its web site.)

The $27 million total of the three grants marks a steep climb compared to earlier programs. In 2005, the National Institute of General Medical Sciences issued grants totalling about $9 million over three years to Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City and The Burnham Institute in La Jolla, California to create 'exploratory centres' for stem cell research. In 2003, the institute issued grants totalling just over $6 million over three years to the University of Washington, University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Medical School and WiCell Research Institute in Madison, Wisconsin. The University of Washington grant, to C. Anthony Blau, funded a comparison of the NIH lines. The Wisconsin grant, again to James Thomson, supportedthe creation of a stem cell core facility to distribute ES cell lines. All the work is limited to stem cell lines created before August 2001.

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