Hippokratis Kiaris, director of the Center for Targeted Therapeutics and the Peromyscus Genetic Stock Center at the USC College of Pharmacy, has received a five-year $2.5 million R24 grant from the National Institutes of Health/National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
The grant, entitled "Enhancing the utility of deer mice as an infectious disease model," will focus on developing reagents and information that will improve the use of Peromyscus models for infectious disease research. The project involves collaborators from the USC School of Medicine Columbia along with a team from Louisiana State University.
The USC College of Pharmacy houses the Peromyscus Genetic Stock Center and is the largest supplier of these mice for medical research in the world.
"Although the Peromyscus Genetic Stock Center at USC has been utilized and admired for decades, its true potential has yet to be fully realized because simple molecular biology reagents such as antibodies do not yet exist for deer mice, which hampers probing the molecular basis of infectious and other diseases," Kiaris says.
Kiaris's plan for the grant will be to first develop antibodies specific to deer mice against key inflammatory and infectious disease-related proteins, and then to create a digital platform that makes it easy for researchers worldwide to utilize the powerful genetics stored in the pedigrees of the different strains with their unique phenotypes.
Michael Wyatt, chair of the Drug Discovery and Biomedical Sciences department in the College of Pharmacy noted, "This announcement is most exciting for the foundation this work will establish, for many more types of announcements of projects that will benefit from this foundational work for decades to come."
Topics: Research, Peromyscus Genetic Stock Center