Congratulations to the four Rosenau Family Research Foundation (RFRF) 2023 grant recipients at Dr. Ernesto Bongarzone’s lab at the University of Illinois, Chicago!
A total of $870,000 granted by the Foundation will support four projects awarded to Dr. Bongarzone, Maria Irene Givogri, PhD, Natalia Saldivia Soto, PhD, and Diego Zelada Varas, PhD, from the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology at the College of Medicine to expand their pursuit to treat and understand this neurological condition.
The Dr. Bongarzone group will use their grants to explore gene therapy’s long-term effects as well as the earliest stages of the disease.
Dr. Saldivia and Dr. Zelada, both postdoctoral researchers in the Dr. Bongarzone lab, are the first recipients of the New Investigator Grants awarded by the RFRF.
The grants are the latest chapter in a long association between the RFRF and Dr. Bongarzone’s research group, which also studies the loss of myelination in brain diseases such as multiple sclerosis. For uncommon conditions such as Krabbe disease – which occurs in roughly 1 out of every 250,000 births – the support of these private funders is crucial. “Without them, we wouldn’t have been able to do half of our work,” Dr. Bongarzone said.
The Foundation also provides opportunities for researchers in the area to collaborate with other laboratories around the world and to meet the patients and caregivers fighting this aggressive disease.“When you actually sit down with the family of an affected child…that moment is a life-changer,” Dr. Bongarzone said. “You take a disease that is written in black and white in a textbook, and now you put a face on it. And that makes you say, what I’m doing is really impacting somebody.”