September 6, 2021
Four Leading Medical Research Philanthropies Announce 2005 Brain Trust Awards
Recipients to Focus on New Technologies That Cross the Blood-Brain Barrier and Target Specific Regions in the Brain
BURLINGAME, Calif., Sept. 6 — Accelerate Brain Cancer Cure (ABC2), the Alzheimer's Association(R), The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research, and The Robert Packard Center for ALS Research at Johns Hopkins today announced the selection of recipients of an awards program initiated this year by The Brain Trust (www.brain-trust.org), a pioneering collaboration that seeks development of new approaches to advance brain disease cures. The Brain Trust's program reviewed applications focused on technologies that can achieve selective targeting and/or delivery of therapeutic agents to specific regions or cells in the brain, including overcoming the limitations imposed by the blood-brain barrier.
Recipients of the 2005 Brain Trust awards are:
- Scott Banta, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Chemical Engineering, and Barclay Morrison III, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Biomedical Engineering, both in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Columbia University. Dr. Banta and Dr. Morrison's project — "Directed evolution of cell penetrating peptides for therapeutic delivery across the blood-brain barrier to specific cellular targets" — was selected by the awards committee because of its potential to enable delivery of therapies for a broad range of neuro-degenerative diseases.
- Ruben Boado, Ph.D., Vice President, Molecular Biology, of ArmaGen Technologies, Inc., for his project entitled — "Genetic Engineering of a Recombinant Neuroprotective Neurotrophin that crosses the Blood-Brain Barrier." ArmaGen was founded by William Pardridge, M.D., to develop platform technology solutions for crossing the blood-brain barrier. These technologies have been shown to deliver small molecules, recombinant proteins and non-viral gene therapies to the brain. Dr. Pardridge is Professor of Medicine at UCLA and has a distinguished career in the blood-brain barrier area.
"We are pleased with the high quality of candidates for the 2005 Brain Trust awards and are excited to announce award recipients who we believe are pursuing unique programs with a broad range of applications and near-term potential," stated John Reher, ABC2 Executive Director. "The project at Columbia will certainly benefit from the university's leading position as a source of innovation in the neurosciences. Further, we think it is a distinct advantage that the ArmaGen team is solely focused on blood-brain barrier technologies because these are a key priority for research into new therapies for diseases of the brain."
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