" Chance favors the prepared mind."

Louis Pasteur

NIGMS Glue Grants

Inflammation and the Host Response to Injury is funded as a "glue" grant by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), a component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). This collaborative research program sponsored by NIGMS is a new mechanism developed beginning in 1998 that encourages independently-funded investigators to work together to solve a major biomedical research problem. The funds are intended to provide the "glue" to bring investigators together and allow them to work together interactively. The program also provides unique opportunities to attract the expertise of other scientists who have not traditionally been involved in biomedical research, such as engineers and informatics specialists. Funded programs make a commitment to NIGMS to share data and materials produced from the glue grant effort to the scientific community that extends beyond researchers participating in the program.

Note: In 2011, NIGMS has decided not to reannounce the Glue Grant large-scale collaborative project award. NIGMS plans future consideration of alternate funding mechanisms for support of collaborative and integrative science.

Click here to learn more about the NIGMS and its funding opportunities

Our Glue Grant

Inflammation and the Host Response to Injury consists of a network of investigators from leading U.S. academic research centers. Participating institutions include hospitals that participate in clinical research studies, academic medical centers that perform analytical studies on blood and tissue samples, and informatics and statistics centers that develop databases and analyze data. The Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston (MGH) is the awardee institution and the "home" of the principal investigator, Dr. Ronald G. Tompkins.

Dr. Tompkins leads the program, which is organized into seven core groups. Each of the core groups is composed of a core director, participating investigators, and other experts. Core personnel are accomplished and highly successful basic scientists working in the areas of research relevant to the focus of each individual core. In addition to researchers who are experts in identifying and quantifying molecular events that occur after injury, the program includes experts who have not traditionally been involved in injury research but have been integrated into the program to expand the multi-disciplinary character of the team. These experts include biologists who are leaders in genome-wide expression analysis, engineers who are well recognized in genome-wide computational analysis, and bioinformatics experts who are leaders in the construction and analysis of large and complex relational databases. Program scientists are mutually supported by core resources that provide the expertise, technology, and comprehensive, consensus-based databases that will define the success of our program.