Researchers at the University of Houston College of Pharmacy have landed more than $1 million in new funding for three separate projects, one of which targets Alzheimer's disease and related dementias. The other two focus on sepsis and on depression in patients with sickle cell disease. What links the three, according to the college, is a shared aim: better patient outcomes through new approaches to prevention, diagnosis and treatment.
The most detailed of the three in the announcement is the sepsis work led by Fanfei Meng, an assistant professor and Presidential Frontier Faculty member in the Department of Pharmacological and Pharmaceutical Sciences. Meng's team has developed a nanomedicine aimed at sepsis and septic shock, which remain among the leading causes of hospital deaths worldwide, and is now seeking patent protection for the technology.
Meng described the early results as encouraging, saying the nanoparticle formulation cut drug toxicity while keeping strong antibacterial activity, broadly dampened inflammatory signaling, and produced complete survival in a preclinical model of severe sepsis. Those are animal-model findings, and the distance between a preclinical result and a treatment used in intensive care units is long.
For families following dementia research, this is an early-stage funding announcement rather than a result. The specifics of the Alzheimer's and related dementias project were not detailed in the college's announcement, so what it will test - and when findings might emerge - remains to be reported. Grant awards of this kind matter mainly because they keep pipelines of investigator-led work moving at university pharmacy schools, where much of the groundwork for future drug and diagnostic candidates is laid.