Grant winners – 5 November 2015

Royal Society

Wolfson Research Merit Awards

These awards are worth £10,000-£30,000 a year, which is a salary enhancement

• Award winner: Adrian Podoleanu
• Institution: University of Kent

Tuneable lasers for optical coherence tomography and their translation

• Award winner: Jonathan Lloyd
• Institution: University of Manchester

Unlocking the biotechnological potential of the subsurface

• Award winner: Benjamin Willcox
• Institution: University of Birmingham

Understanding and exploiting immune recognition of cellular stress

• Award winner: David Stephenson
• Institution: University of Exeter

Stochastic modelling for improving understanding of storm risk

National Institute for Health Research

Efficacy and Mechanism Evaluation Programme

• Award winner: Rebeccah Slater
• Institution: University of Oxford
• Value: £722,731

A blinded randomised controlled trial investigating the efficacy of morphine analgesia for procedural pain in infants

Public Health Research Programme

• Award winner: Michelle McKinley
• Institution: Queen’s University Belfast
• Value: £505,751

A woman-centred, tailored SMS-delivered multi-component intervention for weight loss and maintenance of weight loss in the postpartum period: intervention adaptation and pilot RCT

Health Technology Assessment Programme

• Award winner: Sarah Stock
• Institution: University of Edinburgh
• Value: £719,821

QUIDS: quantitative fibronectin to help decision-making in women with symptoms of preterm labour

Medical Research Council

Research grants

• Award winner: Michele Bombardieri
• Institution: Queen Mary University of London
• Value: £214,841

MICA: Investigating the pathogenic role of T follicular helper cells and their therapeutic targeting in primary Sjögren’s syndrome

• Award winner: Susan Francis
• Institution: University of Nottingham
• Value: £556,942

Human mechanosensation: from first-order neurone to somatosensory cortex

• Award winner: Kevin Fox
• Institution: Cardiff University
• Value: £1,110,920

Optogenetic dissection of homeostatic and Hebbian components of cortical plasticity

In detail

Award winner: Matthew Wood
Institution: University of Oxford
Value: £1,008,110

Exosome-based gene therapy for Huntington’s disease

Despite being comparatively rare, this neurodegenerative disease nevertheless affects one in 10,000 people in the UK. Huntington’s disease puts a huge burden on patients and their families, and there is currently no cure. This is largely because of the inability of therapeutic compounds to cross the blood-brain barrier and enter affected parts of the brain at levels sufficient for clinical benefit. While therapeutic compounds are being developed to treat Huntington’s disease, their delivery into the brain is the major hindrance to their becoming treatments that could be widely used. Over 36 months, the team will develop a new treatment, which can switch off the mutant Huntingtin gene, and cross the blood-brain barrier to enter the brain using small, natural particles called exosomes. This will open the door to testing compounds that have been proven to reduce the levels of the Huntingtin gene. If successful, the method could be used to treat many other currently incurable neurodegenerative diseases.