When President Domenico Grasso announced the $1 billion, 10-year Strategic Initiative Fund (SIF) in November, he encouraged University of Michigan faculty and staff to push the limits of their creativity and ambitions in designing projects that could change the world.
The inaugural open SIF call gave the U-M community the opportunity to submit their ideas for a portion of SIF resources.
The community responded with nearly 500 ideas to improve human health, strengthen communities, and build a more sustainable world.
On Aug. 26, the university announced 37 projects that will receive $40 million in initial funding to pursue those bold ideas.
“The university is making a deliberate and sustained financial commitment to invest in the ideas, people and partnerships that will shape our future and achieve our vision,” Grasso said. “And these initiatives will ensure that Michigan continues to distinguish itself as a place where bold ideas deliver lasting impact.”
To be considered for funding, each proposal had to align with one or more of the five impact areas identified in the Look to Michigan vision and encourage collaboration from scholars and staff across academic departments, university campuses and multiple colleges, schools and units.
“These initiatives reflect the University of Michigan’s academic mission at its best — advancing discovery, enriching education, and bringing people together across disciplines to pursue questions that matter,” said Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost Laurie McCauley. “We are supporting work that strengthens our core commitments to knowledge, learning, and service.”
A Novel Strategy for Effective and Non-Addictive Pain Management
This proposal presents a novel strategy for effective, non-addictive pain management aimed at addressing the major public health and economic burden of acute and chronic pain. Pain affects a large share of adults in the U.S., reduces quality of life, and costs the economy an estimated hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Current pain treatments remain inadequate: opioids are effective but carry serious risks of addiction, overdose, constipation, nausea, dizziness, and dependence, while many non-opioid alternatives have limited efficacy or problematic side effects. The project seeks to develop a safer, non-opioid therapeutic approach that could improve pain treatment while avoiding the addiction risks and other adverse effects associated with current opioid-based care. If successful, the project could establish a new class of non-addictive pain therapeutics and position U-M as a leader in next-generation pain management.
The project focuses on the delta opioid receptor (DOR), a promising but underused target for pain relief. The project’s central hypothesis is that increasing the amount of DOR delivered to the neuronal surface will increase the pain-relieving effectiveness of DOR agonists without increasing adverse effects. The work will build on strong preliminary evidence from the team showing a neuron-specific checkpoint that blocks DOR delivery to the cell surface. Rather than discovering entirely new DOR agonists, the project aims to identify compounds that promote DOR trafficking to the neuronal surface, which could then be combined with DOR agonists. This represents a new therapeutic strategy. The team will screen large compound libraries, use AI and biological validation to identify promising compounds, and optimize them through medicinal chemistry and safety testing, aiming to deliver a lead compound that could impact the quality of life of roughly a fifth of the world’s population.
Learn more about this project and the other awardees on the Look to Michigan website
Read the funding announcement on The University Record’s website