Researchers at University of Iowa Health Care, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), and the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, have been awarded $858,932 in collaborative grant funding from Emily’s Entourage to develop a novel approach for targeted cystic fibrosis therapies.
Paul McCray, Jr., MD, professor of pediatrics-pulmonary medicine at UI Health Care, will collaborate with Beverly Davidson, PhD, at CHOP, and John Lueck, PhD, at University of Rochester, to develop new viral vectors that can effectively target human airway cells and deliver cystic fibrosis (CF) therapies for the 10% of patients with CF mutations that do not respond to current treatments. Both Davidson and Lueck previously worked at UI Health Care.
Emily’s Entourage (EE) is a non-profit organization that accelerates research for new treatments and a cure for the final 10% of people with CF who do not benefit from existing CFTR modulators. The award is the first of EE’s Collaborative Grant program, a newly launched funding initiative to accelerate groundbreaking CF treatment research by bringing together multiple investigators with diverse areas of expertise to jointly tackle challenges in the development of novel CF therapeutics.