The National Institute of General Medical Sciences has awarded two grants for systems biology centers: one is an extension of an existing grant to Princeton University, one of 10 centers it has been funding since 2004; while the other grant establishes a new systems biology center at the University of New Mexico.

Princeton's five-year extension grant of $15.54 million supports the Princeton University Center for Qualitative Biology. David Botstein, who directs the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, leads the center with co-principal investigator Princeton University molecular biologist James Broach.

The Center for Quantitative Biology is housed within the Lewis-Sigler center, Princeton University said in a release.

According to the grant abstract, the programs and infrastructure of the center are set up to foster cross-disciplinary research as well as education. The center aims to develop "realistic and quantitative models" of biological processes; to collect large-scale data sets describing biological processes; to develop methods for computational analysis and for displaying complex models, structures and data; and to develop and support new curricula in quantitative biology education.

The grant will also support several collaborative and multi-disciplinary projects underway, which focus on intracellular signaling, pattern and cell signaling in multicellular organisms, host-pathogen interactions, bioinformatics, and data visualization.

The University of New Mexico has received $14.5 million from NIGMS for a new systems biology center. This is an expansion of previous NIGMS support establishing the New Mexico Center for the Spatiotemporal Modeling Center, or STMC, as a systems biology center.

Janet Oliver of the UNM School of Medicine pathology department will be the principal investigator of the new center.

The center's co-leaders are Bridget Wilson and Jeremy Edwards from the UNM Cancer Center, Stanly Steinberg from the UNM Department of Mathematics and Statistics, William Hlavacek from Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Anup Singh from Sandia National Laboratories.

According to the grant abstract, the work at the center aims to determine how the spatial proximity, dynamics, interactions, and biochemical modifications of membrane receptors and signaling proteins determine the outcome of cell signaling networks; to educate interdisciplinary researchers focused on quantitative, systems level analyses of biomedical processes; to establish an infrastructure for systems biology research and training; and help women and minorities advance within systems biology.

According to the grant abstract, the "anchoring biology" of the center will keep its focus on signaling, for example the high affinity IgE receptor, FceRI, which plays a role in allergies and asthma, and on the modulation of FceRI signaling by crosstalk with the bacteria-sensing formyl peptide receptor and negative crosstalk with the IgG receptor.

The computational teams will develop predictive models of signal initiation at the membrane and of IP3-mediated Ca²⁺ mobilization leading to secretion, according to the abstract.

Researchers at the center will apply rules-based modeling approaches to develop mechanistic kinetic models of early signaling events triggered by the three receptors. In a follow-on step, the scientists plan to develop "an agent-based 3D simulator" to evaluate spatial aspects of receptor signaling, and a "new stochastic spatial model" to address the impact of cellular geometry on calcium regulation will be developed.

The plan is also to perform dose-response studies, pharmacological, and genetic manipulations to test model predictions and validate new targets for clinical interventions, the scientists wrote.

There are also plans to support translation of technical and computational tools to other signaling systems linked to human disease, such other immune diseases and cancer.

Oliver’s combined team will include more than 50 biologists, biophysicists, physicists, mathematicians, engineers, and material scientists, according to a statement by the University of New Mexico.