American research into cell signaling is to benefit from the latest, large-scale National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding initiative. The National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) has announced that its first ‘glue grant’—a new type of grant designed to fund projects requiring cooperation between investigators at multiple institutions—will provide an estimated $25 million over a period of five years to the Alliance for Cell Signaling, an effort to produce a detailed map of the signal transduction pathways in two types of cells, cardiomyocytes and B cells.

In addition to the NIGMS funding, the alliance is being supported by the pharmaceutical companies Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, the Merck Genome Research Institute, Novartis, Chiron Therapeutics, Aventis and the Agouron Institute. Although each will provide around $500,000 a year, organizers insist that none will gain exclusive access to the data. Biotechnology companies Isis Pharmaceuticals and Myriad Genetics have agreed to provide technical support.

One of the most striking features of the alliance is its stringent prohibition against participating researchers' patenting their findings. Alfred Gilman, a researcher at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and organizer of the project, explains, “as soon as we obtain our data in a form that is deemed to be of sufficient quality, it will go into the public domain” in an online database.

The alliance consists of two groups of researchers: participating investigators at 20 different universities will use NIGMS and corporate funding to elucidate the signaling pathways in cardiomyocytes and B cells, whereas general members of the project will maintain sections of the growing database dedicated to particular molecules.

Focusing on only two cell types simplifies the project, but also narrows the field of participants. “I think that it is an excellent concept,” says Joan Brugge, a signal transduction researcher at Harvard Medical School, but “I was not working in the cell systems that [Gilman] chose to work on so it wasn't straightforward for me to join the effort.”

A further limitation of the alliance is its lack of participating investigators outside the US, a situation that has raised hackles among some signal transduction researchers in other countries. ‘Glue grants’ can support research overseas, but Gilman, who shared a 1994 Nobel prize for elucidating the function of G protein-coupled receptors in cell signaling, insists that the geographical limits are technical, not nationalistic. To handle the enormous communication and computing demands of the multi-institution project, the alliance will use Internet 2, the high-speed data network that is available at present only in the US. In addition, says Gilman, “Time zones can be a pain in the neck, too. If we had somebody in England and somebody in Japan who needed to collaborate, that would be a real nuisance.”

In a separate effort, the NIH also announced a large-scale initiative to identify differences in the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) complex in populations worldwide. The International Histocompatibility Working Group (IHWG) will comprise 200 laboratories in 70 countries, and will be funded by a $20 million grant over the next five years. IHWG organizers hope to create a searchable HLA database to assist future research on immune-mediated diseases.