The agreement, which went into effect March 1, will collectively bring in more than $1 million in support for the Sbarro Institute, located on the Temple main campus in the Biology-Life Sciences building.

SHRO is an independent charitable organization that was founded in 1993 by Antonio Giordano, M.D., Ph.D. and Mario Sbarro, owner of the international restaurant chain Sbarro's. SHRO (http://www.shro.org) originally entered into a three-year partnership with Temple in 2002 to fund the Sbarro Institute.

"I'm very excited about the continuation of this partnership between Sbarro and Temple," said Giordano, director of the Sbarro Institute, who also is a professor of biology and co-director of the Center for Biotechnology at Temple. "The first three years at Temple were exceptional in terms of working with my colleagues at the University and the administration's support in promoting our efforts in biomedical research."

Under the new agreement, the Sbarro Institute will expand its research enterprise with the launch of a new program in molecular therapeutics. The program will be headed by the Sbarro Institute's Pier Paolo Claudio, M.D., Ph.D., an associate professor of biology and a member of the Center for Biotechnology.

"Our vision is to develop novel therapeutic approaches to combat a wide range of human diseases by taking advantage of the insights of bench top research and translating molecular genetic techniques to the patients' bedsides," Claudio said.

The molecular therapeutics program is the second new program to be launched by the Sbarro Institute within the past six months. Eva Surmacz, Ph.D., who joined Temple in November as an associate professor
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Contact: Preston M. Moretz
pmoretz@temple.edu
215-204-7476
Temple University
7-Jun-2005