what a relief

More than 51,000 Harris County families receive crucial COVID aid thanks to local charity

Houston families received massive aid thanks to Catholic Charities. Family Houston/Facebook

The global pandemic has wreaked havoc on families in need. But in a much-needed bright spot, a local organization has initiated help to those hardest hit by the COVID downturn.

Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston announced that more than 51,000 families have received aid from the $61.4 million from the Harris County COVID-19 Emergency Direct Assistance Program.

Need-based funds came courtesy of the county's CARES funding and provided a one-time, $1,200 payment to 51,167 eligible applicants, per a press release.
Money was distributed nearly equally across Harris County's four precincts (except for the Precinct 2 surplus), including Houston residents inside Harris County.

To ensure fairness, families were selected from the application pool using a random statistical model that ensured no discrimination, according to Catholic Charities. Funds could be used for any type of emergency expense (housing, food, utilities, healthcare, childcare, transportation, etc.), and families could apply without cooperation from a landlord.

Breaking down the numbers provided in a press release, Harris County initially designated $40 million for the fund; another $20 million was allocated in November. An additional $1.4 million was allocated to the Direct Assistance fund and was earmarked directly for Precinct 2 recipients due to a shortfall of participants in the County's Small Business Grant Program, bringing the program's total to $61.4 million.

Even non-citizen residents who were unable to obtain CARES money due to federal grant requirements will be helped thanks to private funds; those monies are currently being distributed, according to the charity.

Meanwhile, the program provided jobs to nearly 250 laid-off residents, injecting $2.2. million into the local economy.

"Catholic Charities is honored and grateful that Harris County selected our team to serve the community in this way," said Catholic Charities' president and CEO Cynthia N. Colbert, in a statement. "This task was in line with our faith-based mission, which compels us to ensure that every client is treated with respect and dignity."

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This article originally ran on CultureMap.

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A research team housed out of the newly launched Rice Biotech Launch Pad received funding to scale tech that could slash cancer deaths in half. Photo via Rice University

A research funding agency has deployed capital into a team at Rice University that's working to develop a technology that could cut cancer-related deaths in half.

Rice researchers received $45 million from the National Institutes of Health's Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, or ARPA-H, to scale up development of a sense-and-respond implant technology. Rice bioengineer Omid Veiseh leads the team developing the technology as principal investigator.

“Instead of tethering patients to hospital beds, IV bags and external monitors, we’ll use a minimally invasive procedure to implant a small device that continuously monitors their cancer and adjusts their immunotherapy dose in real time,” he says in a news release. “This kind of ‘closed-loop therapy’ has been used for managing diabetes, where you have a glucose monitor that continuously talks to an insulin pump. But for cancer immunotherapy, it’s revolutionary.”

Joining Veiseh on the 19-person research project named THOR, which stands for “targeted hybrid oncotherapeutic regulation,” is Amir Jazaeri, co-PI and professor of gynecologic oncology at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. The device they are developing is called HAMMR, or hybrid advanced molecular manufacturing regulator.

“Cancer cells are continually evolving and adapting to therapy. However, currently available diagnostic tools, including radiologic tests, blood assays and biopsies, provide very infrequent and limited snapshots of this dynamic process," Jazaeri adds. "As a result, today’s therapies treat cancer as if it were a static disease. We believe THOR could transform the status quo by providing real-time data from the tumor environment that can in turn guide more effective and tumor-informed novel therapies.”

With a national team of engineers, physicians, and experts across synthetic biology, materials science, immunology, oncology, and more, the team will receive its funding through the Rice Biotech Launch Pad, a newly launched initiative led by Veiseh that exists to help life-saving medical innovation scale quickly.

"Rice is proud to be the recipient of the second major funding award from the ARPA-H, a new funding agency established last year to support research that catalyzes health breakthroughs," Rice President Reginald DesRoches says. "The research Rice bioengineer Omid Veiseh is doing in leading this team is truly groundbreaking and could potentially save hundreds of thousands of lives each year. This is the type of research that makes a significant impact on the world.”

The initial focus of the technology will be on ovarian cancer, and this funding agreement includes a first-phase clinical trial of HAMMR for the treatment of recurrent ovarian cancer that's expected to take place in the fourth year of THOR’s multi-year project.

“The technology is broadly applicable for peritoneal cancers that affect the pancreas, liver, lungs and other organs,” Veiseh says. “The first clinical trial will focus on refractory recurrent ovarian cancer, and the benefit of that is that we have an ongoing trial for ovarian cancer with our encapsulated cytokine ‘drug factory’ technology. We'll be able to build on that experience. We have already demonstrated a unique model to go from concept to clinical trial within five years, and HAMMR is the next iteration of that approach.”

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