By Ronald Kotulak
Tribune science reporter
Published February 8, 2006
Three Chicago universities will use a grant of up to $50 million from the Searle Funds at the Chicago Community Trust to work together for the first time at solving some of the most difficult problems in medicine.
The grant, announced Tuesday, is a major effort to spur the kind of biomedical research and development that has so far bypassed the Midwest in favor of the East and West Coasts. It will allow Northwestern University, the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago, organized as the Chicago Biomedical Consortium, to set up a unique research collaboration involving hundreds of scientists.
The project is designed to meet the challenges of biomedical science, which has become so complicated that it now requires vast teams of researchers to uncover the cause, cure, treatment and prevention of such major health problems as heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer's disease and diabetes.
"We'll be able to embark on large projects as a city as opposed to one particular university," said Dr. Jonathan Silverstein, assistant professor of surgery at the U. of C. and director of the University of Chicago Hospitals Center for Clinical Information.
"The individual researcher working in his own laboratory has become less important for making discoveries," said Silverstein. "Now it's complex collaborative teams, where you have computer scientists, biologists, chemists, informaticians, mathematicians, physicists and other people working together in order to make discoveries."
The Searle grant is to provide $5 million a year for the first five years and, if the program progresses as planned, another $25 million for the next five years, said Terry Mazany, president and chief executive officer of the Chicago Community Trust.
"Without a doubt, the [consortium] immediately puts Chicago on the map as a leading center for biomedical research, and the potential is enormous for attracting and creating the high-quality professional jobs that Chicago needs to compete in a global environment," he said.
The collaboration, which has already established a computer and information-sharing network among the three universities, will be available to other researchers in the Chicago area. Organizers hope it will stimulate the creation of new centers and programs, boost intellectual investigation, draw top faculty and students from around the country and attract additional research funding from the National Institutes of Health and other organizations.
"Normally academic institutions don't work together," said Richard I. Morimoto, a biology professor with Northwestern's department of biochemistry, molecular biology and cell biology.
"Why can't the students from the U. of C., UIC and Northwestern train together? Why can't they benefit from the individual excellence of each of the schools? Whereas right now the amount of cross-fertilization between our schools is limited."
Since cells and all structures of the body are made of proteins, the new emphasis of biomedical research is on learning how the many thousands of proteins work together and to discover what goes wrong with them to cause disease.
To accommodate this line of research, new fields have sprung up with such labels as systems biology, or the study of protein networks; proteomics, the study of proteins and their functions; and informatics, the use of computers to analyze huge amounts of data.
"We'll be looking at diseases in the most complete way that you can, the fundamental pieces, the proteins," said Brenda Russell, a UIC professor of physiology and biophysics. "We want a comprehensive understanding of living systems and within that there'll certainly be applications that will benefit health care."
The impetus for the collaboration started four years ago when Daniel Searle, the last CEO of the former G.D. Searle & Co. of Skokie, asked the universities if they could work together to develop a new way of doing research.
A charitable trust was created under the will of Daniel Searle's father, John G. Searle, at his death in 1978.
