The research program titled Mechanisms of Cardiovascular Reaction to Injury has been awarded a five-year Program Project Grant totaling $9,165,970 from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Association. This grant is a continuation of a program started 48 years ago.

Earl Benditt, professor and chair of pathology from 1957 to 1981, began the program. He expanded the grant from an R01, the most common type of grant the National Institutes of Health award to a single investigator, into one of the medical school’s first program project grants.

The grant was passed from Benditt to his trainee, Steve Schwartz, professor of pathology, who is still working with the group but no longer as the principal investigator. Schwartz continued it successfully for about 20 years until passing it to his trainee, Charles Murry, associate professor of pathology.

The grant was one of the first National Institutes of Health grants to be funded in excess of $1 million. Now entering its 48th year, the program is believed to be among the longest continuously funded National Institutes of Health grants. The grant is older than Murry, its current principal investigator. The other two investigators are Schwartz and Dan Bowen-Pope, professor of pathology.

The grant’s emphasis has shifted toward cell-based cardiac repair, origins of cells that participate in wound healing, and mechanisms of arterial remodeling after injury.