University of Pittsburgh Receives New Research Funding

According to the Pittsburgh Business Times, the University of Pittsburgh’s Vascular Medicine Institute has received $15 million over the next decade from the Institute for Transfusion Medicine’s Blood Science Foundation, and an extra $5 million to establish the Institute for Transfusion Medicine Research Endowment.
According to the article:

The new funding brings to $50 million the total amount Pitt has received from the Blood Science Foundation and Hemophilia Center of Western Pennsylvania since 2008.

 
University of Pittsburgh’s Chancellor Patrick Gallagher said:

We are proud to celebrate this remarkable partnership and grateful that these organizations – working together – have enabled the university to take some bold steps in the past years to advance our research in vascular medicine and bring a new level of care to the people of our region and beyond.

This announcement follows the news that University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine researchers are participating in a multicenter trial testing whether or not a drug treating brain plagues may later prevent the development of Alzheimer’s disease.
According to a previous Pittsburgh Business Times article:

Studies have shown that brain changes in Alzheimer’s begin many years before the start of symptoms. What’s more, all patients have deposits of beta amyloid in their brains. The researchers will perform a baseline PET scan on otherwise healthy volunteers age 65 to 85 to determine if brain plaques are present. If so, participants will be randomly assigned to receive monthly intravenous infusions of the experimental anti-amyloid antibody or a placebo. All participants will have regular assessments and blood tests for three years.

 
Click here to read the full article outlining the university’s new funding, and click here to read the full article about the Alzheimer’s study.