Update Friday: The University of Washington said this morning that it will use $25 million in Recovery Act funding from NIH to create a new Northwest Genomics Center and explore the origins of common heart, lung and blood disorders.

The UW will receive two of the six "Grand Opportunity" large-scale DNA sequencing project awards to examine the genetic connections to the diseases, which account for three of the leading causes of death in the United States.

UW Professor Debbie Nickerson is one of the principal investigators for the two-year national project. She said the new center "will apply cutting edge, next generation sequencing technology to uncover the differences in our genetic code and explore how these may influence traits, such as cholesterol and blood pressure, that impact our risk for developing cardiovascular disease."

The UW center is one of two sequencing centers for the project, with the second located at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Mass.

"This is one of those times in science when it is just the right moment to scale newly emerging technologies to obtain important medical insights," Nickerson said.

Washington State University said it has received more than $30 million in 42 federal stimulus funding awards, including $9 million from the National Science Foundation, $5 million from NIH and Health and Human Services, and $16 million in Commerce, Energy and other funding related to the Recovery Act.

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Hundreds of health research projects in Washington state have received federal stimulus funding of about $170 million, led by the University of Washington, according to the National Institutes of Health.

The updated NIH database lists millions of dollars in federal stimulus funding to Seattle researchers studying the effectiveness of various cancer diagnostic tools, screening tests and treatments.

On Monday researchers from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, UW and Group Health Cooperative will describe their projects, supported by the National Cancer Institute, that are helping to build a hub for cutting-edge cancer research in Seattle. Of the 385 projects funded in Washington state, 359 of them were in the Seattle area.

My colleague Sandi Doughton wrote about the potential windfall from the $787 billion stimulus package to locally-based scientific research efforts earlier this year.

President Obama announced the funding Wednesday as part of a plan to spend $5 billion on medical and scientific research, medical supplies and upgrading laboratory capacity. The funds come from the $787 billion economic stimulus package.

Washington State University has received close to $3 million, including $1.5 million to professor Norman G. Lewis for a project to classify medicinal plants into a comprehensive database to aid the discovery of new medicines. (NIH only lists funding of $1.46 million for the first year, but the total award is $2.75 million, Lewis said.)

One standout nationwide was the UW, which has had more than 240 projects funded so far for a total of $99 million. At UW, professor Debbie Nickerson leads a project to study human genome variation that received $11 million this year.

Besides scientific research, Recovery Act dollars also went toward social services. Building Changes, a Seattle-based non-profit focused on ending homelessness, received a $1 million grant to provide technical assistance and grants to smaller non-profits serving the homeless and at-risk or very low-income families.

Building Changes is one of 35 organizations in the U.S. awarded money through the Strengthening Communities Fund, which aims to improve the ability of non-profits to help low-income people recover from the recession. Other recipients in Washington state include Seattle's Human Services Department and the Confederate Tribes of Colville Reservation, which received about $250,000 each, and the Northwest Leadership Foundation, which received $1 million.