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NIH Director’s Awards for Seven Penn Faculty

The 2018 NIH Director’s Awards were recently announced, and seven Penn researchers were among the 89 recipients. These grants provide funding to extraordinarily creative scientists proposing highly innovative research to address major challenges in biomedical science. The grants are part of the NIH High-Risk, High-Reward Research Program, which supports ideas with potential for great impact in biomedical research from across the broad scope of the NIH. The Penn awardees are:

New Innovator Awards

caption: Rajan Jaincaption: Matthew Kaysercaption: Michael MitchellRajan Jain, assistant professor of medicine, professor of cell and developmental biology and a member of the Cardiovascular Institute and Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Penn Medicine, will receive $2.4 million to advance understanding of how cell identity is established and maintained. The goal of his group is to decode the rules that instruct genome organization and cellular identity, ultimately revealing implications for human disease.

Matthew Kayser, assistant professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at Penn Medicine, will receive  $2.4 million for research focusing on the function and regulation of sleep during early periods of brain development. His work has shown that specific circuits control sleep early in life and that disrupting sleep during critical developmental periods can lead to neural-circuit malformation and abnormal behaviors in adulthood.

Michael Mitchell, Skirkanich Assistant Professor of Innovation in Penn Engineering’s department of bioengineering, will receive $2.4 million to further his lab’s work employing tools and concepts from cellular engineering, biomaterials science and drug delivery to understand and therapeutically target complex biological barriers in the body. His lab applies its research findings and the drug-delivery technologies developed to a range of human-health applications, including cancer metastasis, immunotherapy and gene editing.

Transformative Research Award

caption: Nicola Masoncaption: Aimee PayneNicola J. Mason, associate professor of medicine and pathobiology at the School of Veterinary Medicine, and Aimee S. Payne, the Albert M. Kligman Associate Professor of Dermatology at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine, received the Transformative Research Award. As co-investigators, they will be sharing $727,277 for the first year of a five-year grant for their project, evaluating a genetically engineered cell-based therapy approach to treat pet dogs with a naturally occurring autoimmune skin disease known as pemphigus. Dogs are one of the few other species to develop pemphigus naturally, and the condition mirrors pemphigus in human patients. Evaluation of this approach may ultimately lead to breakthrough therapies for humans. Dr. Mason and Dr. Payne will continue to focus on their novel gene-engineered chimeric autoantibody receptor T cell (CAART) immunotherapy and its potential to cause lasting remission of antibody-mediated disease.

Early Independence Awards

caption: Mark Sellmyercaption: Anna WexlerMark A. Sellmyer, assistant professor of radiology in the Perelman School of Medicine, will receive $393,349 for the first year of a five-year Early Independence Award for his work on developing small molecule tools and converting molecular-imaging technologies into clinical use in order to address problems in such areas as cancer biology, immunology and infectious disease. Most recently, he developed new positron emission tomography probes to detect bacterial infections in patients.

Anna Wexler, a fellow in advanced biomedical ethics in the department of medical ethics and health policy at Penn Medicine, will receive $402,499 in the first year of a five-year grant for her Early Independence Award to examine the ethical, legal and social implications of emerging neurotechnology, such as do-it-yourself and direct-to-consumer electrical brain stimulation. She also explores how do-it-yourself movements, direct-to-consumer health products and citizen-science initiatives are disrupting traditional models of medicine and science.

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