Rice receives $2.5M to fund collaborative projects

Rice receives $2.5M to fund collaborative projects

BY MICHELE ARNOLD
Special to the Rice News

John Doerr ’73, one of the venture capitalists behind Google, and his wife, Ann Doerr ’75, have given $2.5 million to Rice to support collaborative projects that apply computational science to biomedical research.

The John and Ann Doerr Fund for Computational Biomedicine will provide seed grants under the Collaborative Advances in Biomedical Computing (CABC) program of the Gulf Coast Center for Computational Cancer Research (GC4R).

“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,” said Ken Kennedy, University Professor, the Ann and John Doerr Professor in Computational Engineering in Computer Science and professor of 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.”

Courtesy photo

Pictured from left are Ann Doerr ’75; Ken Kennedy, University Professor, the Ann and John Doerr Professor in Computational Engineering in Computer Science and professor of electrical and computer engineering; and John Doerr ’73.

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 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.

“We are bringing together enormously talented people who have expertise in computer science with enormously talented people who want to use computing techniques to make drug discoveries and to introduce biomarkers into clinical trials among other applications,” said Berry, professor and chair of M.D Anderson’s Department of Biostatistics and Applied Mathematics.
For more information about CABC, visit <http://gc4r.rice.edu>.

—Michele Arnold is the senior writer in Rice’s Office of Development.