Fostering Innovation

Earlier this year, select groups of researchers and physicians across Grounds received inaugural awards from a new grant program at UVA. The Biomedical Innovation Fund supports early stage research projects that hold promise in addressing unmet clinical needs. The program is funded by the Ivy Foundation of Charlottesville. This year, five high-risk projects will receive a total of $260,000 from the foundation.

“We are thrilled at the opportunity to support research that holds the potential to have a direct, clinical impact," said Robert W. Battle, M.D., chair of the Ivy Foundation and a member of the Board of Trustees of the UVA Health Foundation. "The caliber of biomedical research at UVA is impressive, and this program is designed to speed the best and most promising ideas from the lab to the patient's bedside.”

A Window Into Early Alzheimer’s Disease
One promising project that received funding in 2009 aims to develop a tool for the early detection of Alzheimer’s disease. Such a discovery could revolutionize the way the disease is managed, and open new avenues for intervention.

Two of the three investigators involved in the project—Mario Geysen, Ph.D., professor of chemistry and pharmacology, and George Bloom, Ph.D., professor of biology and cell biology—had been partnering for years, combining their talents to develop targeted drug therapies for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease.

When David Geldmacher, M.D., associate professor of neurology, learned of their work, he wondered if the molecular delivery system and cellular targets they were investigating might also be effective tools for the diagnosis, rather than just the treatment, of Alzheimer's disease.

“For years, I've taught and published on the importance of early and accurate clinical diagnosis of Alzheimer's,” Geldmacher says. “What Geysen and Bloom were doing had important implications for pushing diagnosis back to the ‘presymptomatic’ phase, just like today we can intervene on heart disease with lifestyle modification and cholesterol-lowering drugs long before the first heart attack.”

Geldmacher, Geysen, and Bloom are working to develop a uniquely engineered molecule that would bind to amyloid peptide, a protein fragment that accumulates abnormally in people affected by Alzheimer's disease. The test molecule would be "tagged" with a nuclear medicine tracer, allowing doctors to see, on a PET scan, where in the brain abnormalities are beginning to occur.

UVA Vice President and School of Medicine Dean Steven DeKosky, M.D., has been a leader in the use of PET scans for diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease. The methods being developed with support from the Ivy Fund represent a complementary approach that may also be adaptable to broadly available MRI or CAT scan technologies.

Importance of Philanthropy
This recent gift builds on a history of support from the Ivy Foundation. In 2005, a transformational gift of $45 million funded new space for biomedical research at UVA, paving the way for the future Ivy Foundation Translational Research Building. The gift also provided generous funding for two new clinical facilities at UVA, the Emily Couric Clinical Cancer Center and the Barry and Bill Battle Building at UVA Children's Hospital.

"The Ivy Foundation's support of biomedical innovation at UVA has already played a critical role in establishing the University as a national leader in moving creative discoveries to applications that help people," said Thomas Skalak, Ph.D., UVA's vice president for research. "This new program fosters a culture of collaborative innovation at UVA and gives us a new way to identify promising research projects with the potential to yield leading-edge diagnostics and treatments."

Research is costly, and not all ideas are eligible for federal funding, especially in their early stages. Philanthropy plays a key role in giving investigators the opportunity to pursue their best ideas.

Geldmacher can testify. “I, personally, would not be involved in this aspect of Alzheimer’s research without the Ivy award,” he notes.