Scientists at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) have begun to benefit from federal grants supporting high-risk research. But long before such opportunities existed, UCSF formed its own program to encourage faculty and postdoctoral fellows to think boldly. The Program for Breakthrough Biomedical Research (PBBR) currently awards about $6 million every year to projects of potentially high impact that are substantially more creative or risky than projects supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other traditional funding mechanisms. Despite its relatively small size, the 13-year-old PBBR, formerly known as the Sandler Program in Basic Science, has generated more than $300 million in subsequent grant funding.<\/p>\n
Among recipients is Wendell Lim, PhD, professor of cellular and molecular pharmacology, who is engineering “smart cells” that are programmed to carry out novel therapeutic functions in cancer and regenerative medicine. His lab’s PBBR grant enabled him to advance his research to the point where the NIH started to take notice. The PBBR also opened doors for Allison Doupe, MD, PhD, whose pioneering and somewhat quirky research into songbird learning has revealed clues that may improve the scientific community’s understanding of human brain development and disorders such as autism, schizophrenia, and Parkinson’s disease. Doupe, a professor of psychiatry and physiology and a member of UCSF’s Keck Center for Integrative Neuroscience, found that songbirds — like humans — have specialized areas of the brain devoted to learning. By altering the part of the brain known as the basal ganglia, Doupe and her colleagues effectively eliminated variability in the birds’ songs, which interfered with their ability to learn. Since receiving her PBBR grant, Doupe has also obtained funding from the NIH and several research foundations. Says Keith Yamamoto, PhD, PBBR director and executive vice dean of the UCSF School of Medicine: “The message to our researchers is: We so value the kind of thinking you do, and we want to support it and promote it.”<\/p>\n