December 2024: Updates to PRF’s Research Granting Structure

At PRF’s December 2024 Medical Research Committee (MRC) Summit, PRF leadership and the MRC implemented changes to its granting process.

Фон
In 2000, The Progeria Research Foundation (PRF) formed its volunteer Medical Research Committee – a group of brilliant and dedicated scientists who regularly met to review funding requests from around the world. Over the course of 24 years, PRF’s Medical Research Committee approved funding for 85 grants totaling over $9.1 million for Progeria-related research performed in 18 U.S. states and 14 countries.

You can read more тут about grants we have funded since 1999 and biological sketches of the researchers.

When PRF was created, there was no cause, treatment or cure for children with Progeria, and there was almost no research funding to support the scientific community’s exploration of Progeria. With PRF’s programmatic support, this field has been transformed. We’ve gone from an average of 2 publications per year, to over 130 per year – half of which are funded, in whole or in part, by PRF. We’ve discovered the cause, we have our first regulatory-approved therapy, we’ve discovered the disease-causing protein progerin not only causes Progeria but plays a role in atherosclerosis and general aging, and our researchers have made countless other discoveries that form the basis of our ever-forward movement towards new treatments and the cure for Progeria.

Every few years, PRF’s Medical Research Committee conducts a Grants Program Summit.  Its goal is to update the PRF research grant program so that it remains optimally effective.  The changes are guided by the interim advancements in the field, technology, and/or other relevant factors.

PRF’s New Granting Policy
At PRF’s MRC Summit Meeting in 2024, PRF leadership and the MRC implemented a change to the granting strategy as follows:

The biannual call for applications has been replaced by two types of grant pathways:

1. A proactive pathway where PRF identifies a need and seeks out laboratories best suited to conduct the research that will fill that need; and
2. An investigator-driven pathway where PRF will entertain research projects based on communications initiated by the investigator that includes a brief abstract, via grants@progeriaresearch.org. There is no set due date for these communications, and full proposals are by invitation-only.  PRF will enlist subject matter experts to review the full research proposal.

We are incredibly grateful to our Medical Research Committee volunteers who helped advance the trajectory of progeria research in such a meaningful way.

Pictured above, left – right, are: В. Роберт Бішоп, доктор філософії, Thomas Glover, PhD, Vicente Andres Garcia, PhD, Leslie Gordon, MD, PhD,
Christine Harling-Berg, PhD, Bryan P. Toole, PhD (MRC Chairman), Maria Eriksson, PhD, and W. Ted Brown, MD, PhD

Not pictured above left-right: Monica Kleinman, MD (seen here with Sam Berns in 2007) and Marsha Moses, MD, PhD

Please Join Us!
PRF holds biannual scientific workshops, where the research community comes together to share data, collaborate, and stimulate the next wave of progress towards the cure. We encourage all researchers and clinicians involved in or interested in driving Progeria research toward new treatments and the cure to attend our next Scientific Workshop, scheduled for October 2025 in Cambridge MA. Register here.