Four UNC-Chapel Hill students have been named by the North Carolina Biotechnology Center as members of its first class of Pfizer-NCBiotech Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellows in Gene Therapy. The student fellows from Carolina include Charles Askew, Carlos Cruz-Teran, Lauriel Earley and Sara Powell. They will be joined by two additional fellows from Duke University.
As part of their fellowships, these Carolina students will receive two-year awards of up to $190,340 each. These fellowships play a critical role in advancing promising research because they allow the postdoc students to conduct research in laboratories headed by faculty investigators working on gene therapies at UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke.
In early 2017, Pfizer contributed $4 million to NCBiotech to establish and administer the fellowship program. This program comes in the context of the companies broader efforts to increase its involvement in gene therapy and tap into the expertise of the state’s growing work in this area that is fueled by UNC-Chapel Hill and other top research universities in the region.
For example, Pfizer also expanded its facilities in Sanford, NC during 2017, investing $100 million into the site and creating 40 jobs over three years. In 2016, Pfizer also acquired UNC-affiliated startup Bamboo Therapeutics and its gene therapy manufacturing facility.
Read more at NCBiotech
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