Our Research Approach
We are about team-based scientific discovery. Recent initiatives by our translational research teams have led to successful applications to the NIH for the KU Alzheimer's Disease Research Center and NeuroNEXT, which is a joint effort between KU Medical Center and Children's Mercy Hospital supporting clinical trials for neurological therapies.
We have advanced major research programs by recruiting members in complementary disciplines and using established scientific cores to develop clinical models that can be used to explore therapies. One example is the Spinal Cord Injury Repair Program. This translational research enterprise is supported primarily through a $4 million philanthropic partnership, and is focused on brain-computer interfaces and patient-derived genetically engineered stem cells as potential therapeutic strategies. This initiative involves more than 18 faculty investigators from several institutions and draws heavily on our affiliated core services in behavioral analysis, genetic engineering and imaging.
A joint venture between KU Medical Center and Children's Mercy Hospital, the Pediatrics Genomics division, funded by the Kansas City Area Life Sciences Institute, is another example of our team-based approach. In this program, our genetic engineering and transgenic mouse facilities use gene sequencing data from afflicted patients to generate mouse models, which are then characterized by our behavioral testing and our imaging cores, and potential therapies are investigated by our disease model and testing facility.
We are poised to create similar teams of experts and muster an array of cutting-edge core scientific technologies to conduct similar investigations in any of the other 20 neurological disorders that lie within the focus of the Institute for Neurological Discoveries.