The MIT Center for Integrative Synthetic Biology, under the leadership of director Ron Weiss and co-director Christopher Voigt, has been awarded a $11.4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The five-year P50 grants, awarded by NIH’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences, support research for disease diagnosis, treatment and prevention at centers with multi-investigator, interdisciplinary teams. The grant awarded to MIT’s synthetic biology center, headquartered in the Department of Biological Engineering, will enable systems and synthetic biologists to help advance health-related applications that would otherwise be difficult to achieve through solely independent investigator-led research efforts.

Center investigators include eight MIT faculty who will focus on three medically relevant research subjects positioned at the intersection of systems biology and synthetic biology: cancer therapy, artificial tissue homeostasis for beta cells, and infectious disease.