Innovation, influence and business in America's medical cities.

The University of Cincinnati will use a $3.6 million grant, in collaboration with Cleveland Clinic, to research how thinking about physical acts can help stroke patients. A $1.57 million grant will fund ongoing research at Case Western Reserve University to develop a treatment for the eye infection bacterial keratitis.

House Bill 283, proposed late last week by State Rep. Sandra Williams, would be provided by the Ohio Department of Development and is for workers who are not already in the biotech sector.

The National Institutes of Health will provide $4.9 million so Case researchers can try to identify patients’ inborn genetic susceptibility to develop colon cancer from some other cancer, $1.5 million to the Cleveland Clinic to research deep brain stimulation, and $1.9 million to the Clinic to research whether viruses could be the cause of certain types of bone marrow cancers and other blood disorders.

The grants, worth a total of $500,000, are awarded to Dr. William Fissell and Dr. Andrew Stephenson.

MedCity News on Thursday was awarded a grant from the Innovation Fund of the Lorain County Community College Foundation that’s meant for nascent businesses to build out technology to improve their businesses and lead to job growth.

The bulk of the funding will try to develop software to help neuroscience researchers screen speech patterns. The remainder of the grant will develop a speech-monitoring device to help the hearing impaired communicate with others.

The five-year grant will help keep the Case West Reserve University facility open through 2014 so it can continue its work helping researchers investigate proteins and other molecules that could lead to designer drugs.

Stimulus money hasn’t delivered enough to medical researchers and the country is losing a generation of medical researchers because of it, writes Dr. Joseph Clark. “My career has stopped being about doing science and is now a life of begging for money, with the education of future scientists sadly becoming a very low priority. Burgeoning scientists see this as students and realize there is no future for them.”

Researchers have over the past decade seen a connection between the nervous system and painful bladder syndrome, known as interstitial cystitis. Often, patients with the syndrome will either have or have a family member with another autonomic disorder. Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine has received the grant and will coordinate the five-year study with researchers from Cleveland’s University Hospitals, Ohio State University, Cleveland Clinic and Summa Health System.

Yiping Han’s focus is on fusobacterium nucleatum and a specific molecule, FadA, that may trigger a process that lets the bacterium enter and spread within a woman’s placenta during birth.