UC San Diego won a five-year grant valued at up to $5 million from the National Institutes of Health that the university will use to create a biomedical technology research center, according to information released Oct. 15 by a division of the NIH.

The federal agency’s National Center for Research Resources division said it would provide up to $11 million over five years to UCSD and the Northern California Institute for Research and Education Inc. in San Francisco to establish the research centers.

UC San Diego will create cutting-edge software capable of identifying and analyzing sets of interacting proteins, which are important to understanding a wide range of diseases, such as cancer. The new computational mass spectrometry center will serve as an international resource in proteomics, or the large-scale study of proteins. Studying proteins can lead to a better understanding of how diseases form and how they progress.

The Northern California Institute will receive a five-year award valued as high as $6 million to develop a center for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of neurodegenerative disorders. The center will develop improved techniques to provide clinicians a better understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

— Heather Chambers