Biomedical researcher Samantha Morris, shown here in her lab at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, is one of the newly named Allen Distinguished Investigators. This award is enabling us to take a big risk in our arena by generating a completely new technology, one which will be useful to the scientific community. Thats really exciting for us, she said. (Washington University in St. Louis Photo)

The Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group, a division of Seattles Allen Institute, is making a total of $7.5 million in awards to its latest class of five biomedical researchers.

The themes for this years Allen Distinguished Investigators focus on stem cell therapies and single-cell interactions in their native environments.

The field of stem cell biology has the potential to change how we treat diseases by helping precision medicine, and theres so much we still dont understand about the interplay between cells in living tissues or organs, Kathy Richmond, director of the Frontiers Group, said today in a news release.

Our 2019 Allen Distinguished Investigators are pushing their fields in these two areas, through new technology development, probing pivotal interactions in the body that cause health to fail, and generating creative new stem cell models that will improve our understanding of different human diseases, she said.

The late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen gave the Allen Distinguished Investigator program its start in 2010 as a way to support significant early-stage research thats less likely to receive grants from traditional sources. This years selections bring the roster to a total of 74 researchers, including 13 from the University of Washington.

Each of the investigators will receive $1.5 million in support for their projects over three years. Heres a rundown on the Class of 2019:

Samantha Morris of Washington University in St. Louis aims to create a blueprint of cell identity that will enable researchers to improve the way they generate different kinds of cells from human stem cells.

Joshua Rabinowitz of Princeton University will lead a team developing new technologies to study metabolites, the molecules that result from our bodies conversion of food into energy, as well as metabolic activity in single cells from mouse and human tissue.

Clive Svendsen of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center will use stem cells to model how interactions between the gut microbiome and the brain might influence neuron death in patients with Parkinsons disease.

Savas Tay and his colleagues at the University of Chicago are looking into the roots of Crohns disease by combining the study of gene expression with single-cell measurements of proteins and protein complexes, using samples of healthy and diseased gut tissue.

James Wells and his colleagues of Cincinnati Childrens Hospital Medical Center will use stem cells to study maladies that affect enteroendocrine cells, which sense nutrients from the food we eat and then control how those nutrients are processed in the intestines.

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2019s Allen Distinguished Investigators will focus on the mysteries of our cells - GeekWire