Four University researchers have been awarded prestigious grants totaling $4.7 million from the National Institute of Health for completely outside the box research projects. The grants were awarded for medicine, chemistry and engineering,

The NIH awarded the grants through the Exceptional, Unconventional Research Enabling Knowledge Acceleration (EUREKA) program. The program aims to promote studies examining unproven hypotheses that would not usually receive financial support.

Dr. Jon-Kar Zubieta, professor of psychiatry and radiology at the University Medical School, who received a EUREKA grant of $1.2 million, said the NIH uses the grant to support projects that are often overlooked.

“They were basically looking for what they call high-risk, high-impact grants that are maybe, because of complexity or because they are more bold, don’t typically (receive) usual funding mechanisms,” Zubieta said.

Zubieta researches how the placebo effect influences patients suffering from substance abuse and depression’s neurobiological mechanisms. He hopes to further his research by honing in on the neural systems that cause placebo effects to occur.

Dr. Joseph Holoshitz, professor of internal medicine and associate chief for research in the Division of Rheumatology at the University Medical School, also received $1.2 million in EUREKA grants.

Over the past few years, Holoshitz has been researching the occurrence of arthrosclerosis — when fat collects on the walls of arteries — in rheumatoid arthritis patients. He plans on using the grant money to investigate whether a particular gene that is known to be associated with rheumatoid arthritis, is also responsible for causing arthrosclerosis.

“We’ve shown that that interaction can indeed explain the association of the genetic marker with the disease and explain the association with the severity of the disease,” Holoshitz said.

Dr. Matthew Soellner, assistant professor of medical chemistry in the College of Pharmacy, received $1.2 million to create molecules that impede enzyme activity that is responsible for the progression of cancer in patients. These molecules are aimed at ridding cancer patients of drug-resistant enzymes that cause their treatment to be much more toxic.

EUREKA awarded $1 million to Dr. H.V. Jagadish, professor of electrical engineering and computer science. Jagadish plans to use biological knowledge, obtained through literature and databases, to analyze various experiments that could enhance understanding of many diseases, including diabetes.

EUREKA awarded 56 grants to researchers across the nation. The program also handed out an additional $10.6 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to 10 projects. Jeremy Berg, director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, said in an interview that there were hundreds of applicants who applied but did not receive funding.

Berg added that researchers getting EUREKA grants are involved in a variety of innovative projects.

“The research supported by EUREKA could provide us with new concepts, tools and approaches that have a profound impact on our understanding of biology,” he wrote in a statement. “From fundamental life processes to human diseases and behavior.”

Examples of grant recipients from outside the University of Michigan include Dr. Carl Johnson, of Vanderbilt University, who is studying the circadian clocks of yeast and single-celled bacteria to better understand the sleep cycles of many organisms, including humans.