INDIANAPOLIS — In a room at the top of one of the state’s tallest buildings, an Indiana University researcher made a big promise.
Anantha Shekhar, IU associate vice president for clinical affairs, said in the next 10 years his team will cure one cancer and one childhood disease, as well as find ways to prevent one chronic illness and one neurodegenerative disease.
“If we haven’t done those,” he said after the announcement in the Skyline Club at One America Tower, “I would say we have failed.”
IU President Michael McRobbie doesn’t think the team will fail. That’s why he pledged to provide the researchers Shekhar will lead with $120 million over the next five years. That’s enough money to cover the cost of attending IU for more than 4,000 undergraduate students.
Fred Cate, IU’s vice president for research, acknowledged money like that could be used to make a big difference in the lives of a few thousand students, but said he believes using the money to fund the type of research Shekhar and his team have proposed will have a much greater impact.
“That same money might transform people’s health for generations to come,” he said.
Cate served on an eight-member steering committee that recommended Shekhar’s Precision Health Initiative as the first recipient of funding from IU’s Grand Challenges Program.
Last fall, IU announced it would invest at least $300 million over the next five years to help solve some of the world’s most pressing problems. Up to five large-scale research projects will be selected before IU’s bicentennial in 2020 to address problems such as energy availability, infectious diseases and climate change.
Twenty-one preliminary proposals were submitted for the first round of funding. The five finalists focused on medicine or environmental science and policy. All five proposals were strong, Cate said, but the Precision Health Initiative was chosen, in part, because of its clear objective.