Rice Receives $2.5M To Fund Collaborative Projects

The John and Ann Doerr Fund for Computational Biomedicine, established by John Doerr ’73, one of the venture capitalists behind Google, and his wife, Ann Doerr ’75, will provide a $2.5 million grant to Rice under the Collaborative Advances in Biomedical Computing (CABC) program of the Gulf Coast Center for Computational Cancer Research (GC4R). The seed money will be used to support collaborative projects that apply computational science to biomedical research.

“This fund will help overcome a fundamental impediment to initiating research projects that combine computer science with biomedical sciences: the difficulty of establishing the track record of success needed to attract funding from major agencies such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health,” says Ken Kennedy, University Professor, the Ann and John Doerr Professor in Computational Engineering in Computer Science, and professor in electrical and computer engineering. “The CABC seed grants will give collaborators on both sides of Main Street enough resources to get started on high-impact joint efforts that will bear fruit over the next decade.”

Rice and the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center formed GC4R, which is co-directed by Kennedy and M.D. Anderson’s Donald Berry, to foster joint research projects between computational scientists at Rice and cancer researchers in the Texas Medical Center. GC4R is part of the Gulf Coast Consortia, a collaborative alliance for interdisciplinary bioscience training and research composed of Rice, M.D. Anderson, Baylor College of Medicine, the University of Houston, the University of Texas Medical Branch–Galveston, and the University of Texas Health Science Center–Houston.

The first three CABC seed grants were awarded this past spring. The research includes investigations into more-effective and less-toxic cancer drugs, the development of new software and diagnostic techniques for four-dimensional CT scans, and the creation of new models of the complex protein regulatory networks of cancer cells.

For more information about CABC, visit the GC4R website.

—Michele Arnold