$2.9-Million Grant to Expand Scripps’ New Chemistry Department : Medicine: The money will mean another faculty position and help in buying costly equipment for the department’s bio-organic research.

The Research Institute of Scripps Clinic will use a $2.9-million grant from the Los Angeles-based W. M. Keck Foundation to fund an additional senior-level faculty member at Scripps’ rapidly expanding chemistry department, institute officials said Monday.

The grant was announced just weeks after the receipt of a $1-million grant from La Jolla residents Richard and Alice Cramer. Scripps will use the two grants to finance a pair of senior staff researchers for the department.

The Keck grant is part of a flurry of activity since the formation of the chemistry department last spring. The department will move next year into a building under construction on a tract across the street from Scripps’ facilities on North Torrey Pines Road.

The department hired Kyriacos C. Nicolaou, 42, a noted organic chemist, last spring as its first chairman. It also hired Jeffrey Skolnick, a chemistry professor, and Chi-Huey Wong, a biochemist, both experts in drug design.

Scripps also intends to hire investigators who “will further strengthen our new department of chemistry and its focus on bio-organic chemistry, a discipline which scientists anticipate will yield major breakthroughs in the study and solution of some of our most challenging medical and biological problems,” said Scripps Clinic President Charles C. Edwards.

A hefty percentage of the Keck grant will pay for equipment that “is tailor-made for the needs” of the department, Scripps spokeswoman Sue Pondrom said. Federal regulations prevent using government money to purchase the costly equipment, she said.

The $2.9-million grant will also pay the salaries of senior research associates, technicians, postdoctoral fellows and other support staff, according to Richard Lerner, director of the research institute. Lerner said “several prominent scientists from major universities are being considered for the Keck-funded position.”

The researchers hired with the Keck and Cramer funds will join a research team that is “already at full speed addressing problems in synthetic and bio-organic chemistry relevant to biomedical research,” Nicolaou said. “We are merging the power of chemistry and biology in our efforts to identify and pursue solutions to problems of major significance that may one day lead to new biomedical breakthroughs.”

Scripps hopes the chemistry department will eventually synthesize natural compounds and synthetic derivatives that might have applications in the treatment of blood clots, stroke, heart attacks, asthma, allergies, rheumatoid arthritis and cancer.

The chemistry department building will be the first new building on the Lusk Research Campus, the tract across from the existing Scripps campus.

Richard Cramer, founder of IVAC and IMED, medical-instrument companies, was most recently chief executive officer of Fisher Scientific Group, a La Jolla-based biomedical products company.

The Cramers previously had donated $1.3 million to Scripps, part of which was used to support the Ida M. Green Cancer Center. Cramer has served on the Scripps Clinic board of trustees since 1982.

The Keck Foundation previously donated more than $1.7 million to Scripps Clinic.