George and Judy Marcus Awards
Marcus Program in Precision Medicine Innovation
2020 Awardees
The Marcus Program in Precision Medicine Innovation is pleased to announce the results of the 2020 cycle for innovative collaborative project proposals for the Seeding Bold Ideas, Transformative Integrated Research Initiatives and ELSI in Precision Medicine. We received a total of 44 excellent and potentially transformative trans-disciplinary research proposals from faculty across UCSF. 18 cross-disciplinary teams submitted proposals to the Seeding Bold Ideas (SBI) Initiative, 20 teams submitted to the Transformative Integrated Research (TIR) Initiative and 6 teams submitted to Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications (ELSI) in Precision Medicine Initiative.
A committee of researchers representing basic, clinical, computational health, and social/behavioral sciences reviewed, discussed, and selected 9 SBI projects, 4 TIR projects and 3 ELSI projects for funding, distributing over $2M dollars.
In addition, this cycle we introduced two funding supplement initiatives in support of inclusive excellence. The first program provides a supplement for awarded research projects involving human subjects to receive a Patient and Community Advisory Board (PCAB) review of their proposed study. The UCSF Clinical and Translational Science Institute’s (CTSI) Community Engagement and Health Policy program (CEHP) facilitates the PCAB, which was created to provide an easily accessible and efficient mechanism for UCSF researchers to obtain patient and community stakeholder input for their research projects. Eleven awarded projects are eligible for this supplement (denoted with an & in table below). The second inclusive excellence initiative is a Marcus Diversity Supplement which was awarded to all funded projects where either at least one member of the PI team is of a historically underserved background or where the project includes historically underserved people in the experimental design. We awarded 7 Diversity Supplements (denoted with ♦ in table below).
The awardees for the Marcus Program in Precision Medicine Innovation 2020 Seeding Bold Ideas (SBI) Initiative are:
Team |
Proposal Title |
W. Patrick Devine, MD, PhD Zian Tseng, MD, MAS Brian Black, PhD |
Somatic Mosaicism in Autopsy-Defined Sudden Cardiac Death |
Ernesto Diaz-Flores, PhD Arun Wiita, MD, PhD |
Designing and implementing a selective immunotherapy against mutant p53 towards a curative outcome in deadly childhood leukemia ♦ |
Xin Duan, PhD Ying Han, MD, PhD Benyam Kinde, MD, PhD |
A novel application of Osteopontin for treating glaucomatous optic neuropathy & ♦ |
Michelle Melisko, MD Max Krummel, PhD |
Defining T cell populations in cerebrospinal fluid of patients with leptomeningeal & |
Mary Nakamura, MD Lianne Gensler, MD Mehrdad Matloubian, MD, PhD Monica Yang, MD Timothy Henrich, MD, MMSc Rachel Rutishauser, MD, PhD |
COVID-19 Vaccine Responses in Patients with Autoimmune Disease & |
Anne Slavotinek, MD, PhD Alejandra de Alba Campomanes, MD, MPH Sergio Baranzini, PhD |
RNA-Seq in the diagnosis of Pediatric cataracts & ♦ |
Alessandro Villa, DDS, PhD, MPH Kyle Jones, DDS, PhD Yvonne Kapila, DDS, PhD |
The Oral Microbiome in Oral Epithelial Dysplasia and Oral Squamous Cell Carcinoma Pathogenesis & ♦ |
Michael Wilson, MD Joseph DeRisi, PhD |
Large Scale Novel Methods for BCR-Antigen Sequencing & |
Matt Zinter, MD Joseph DeRisi, PhD |
Metatranscriptomic Assessment of Lung Health in Pediatric Hematopoietic Cell Transplant Candidates & |
The awardees for the Marcus Program in Precision Medicine Innovation 2020 Transformative Integrated Research (TIR) Initiative are:
Team |
Proposal Title |
Andrei Goga, MD, PhD Katie Kelley, MD Daniel Nomura, PhD |
Precision therapy of liver cancer by targeting the alanine metabolic pathway & |
Aashish Manglik, MD, PhD Boris Bastian, MD, PhD |
Exploiting Gq signaling dynamics for precise inhibition of uveal melanoma oncogenic variants |
Aleksander Rajkovic, MD, PhD Susan Fisher, PhD Marcelle Cedars, MD |
Pre-implantation precision medicine: Prevention and prediction of adverse pregnancy outcomes |
David Raleigh, MD, PhD Luke Gilbert, PhD William Weiss, MD, PhD |
Understanding in vivo cellular and genomic mechanisms of glioblastoma |
The awardees for the Marcus Program in Precision Medicine Innovation 2020 Ethics, Legal and Social Implications (ELSI) in Precision Medicine Initiative are:
Team |
Proposal Title |
Galen Joseph, PhD Aleksander Rajkovic, MD, PhD |
Patient and Physician Perspectives on Value, Utility and Implications of Recording Geographic Ancestry from Genomic Sequencing in the Electronic Health Record & ♦ |
Dean Schillinger, MD Janet Shim, PhD William Brown III, PhD, DrPH, MA |
Precision Communication: Harnessing Precision Medicine to Transform the Most Common Medical Procedure and Reduce Health Disparities & ♦ |
Janet Wojcicki, PhD, MPH, MAS Elissa Epel, PhD |
Telomeres are shortening with sugar! Does a motivational intervention for reducing sugar sweetened beverage consumption work better with personal telomere testing?: A Randomized Trial & ♦ |