Columbia Researchers Receive Grants for High-Risk, High-Reward Projects

Three Columbia University Medical Center researchers have received prestigious High Risk-High Reward grants from the NIH Common Fund. The three grants are among 85 awarded this year for highly innovative approaches to major contemporary challenges in biomedical research.

The High Risk-High Reward program supports scientists with four types of awards: NIH Pioneer, New Innovator, Transformative Research, and Early Independence.

Computational biologist Dana Pe’er, PhD, associate professor of biological sciences and systems biology, received one of this year’s 10 Pioneer Awards, which support ideas that are substantially different from those already being pursued in the investigator’s laboratory or elsewhere.

Dr. Pe'er will use the award to begin construction of a complete atlas of all cells in the human body and how they develop from a single embryonic cell. Once complete, the new atlas will transform understanding of disease, Dr. Pe’er says. “There are so many diseases that result from malfunctions in the molecular programs that control the development of our cell repertoire. We can truly understand what goes wrong diseases such as cancer, autoimmune diseases, and neural developmental disorders only if we have a complete map of how cells progress during normal development.”

Read more about her research on the Systems Biology website.

Two CUMC researchers—Kyle Allison, PhD, and Sean Escola, MD, PhD—have received Early Independence Awards, which have been given since 2011 to provide an opportunity for exceptional junior scientists who have recently received their doctoral degree or finished medical residency to move immediately into independent research positions. The NIH selected 17 Early Independence awardees this year.

Dr. Escola, a faculty member in the Department of Psychiatry, says his research goal is to develop theories of the computations that are performed by the neural circuits in the brain. “This is important because neuropsychiatric diseases can be thought of as failures of neural computation. Specifically, I study the internal ‘states’ of neural circuits that reflect a human’s or animal’s current behavioral goals. The questions I explore are how does a neural circuit implement a specific internal state, and how does a circuit switch to a new state when the goals change.”

Since certain diseases such as obsessive-compulsive disorder are thought to involve disordered internal states or transitions between states, Dr. Escola says the work will increase our understanding of these illnesses and may lead to fundamentally new approaches to diagnosis and treatment.

Dr. Allison, a postdoctoral scientist in the laboratory of systems biology professor Saeed Tavazoie, has received funds to open his own laboratory at Columbia and pursue independent research to investigate the problem of bacterial persistence.

Bacterial persistence occurs when individual bacterial cells survive treatment with antibiotics that kill other identical cells. Scientists do not fully understand the causes of bacterial persistence, though its occurrence suggests that bacterial populations are not homogeneous but contain cells that are physiologically distinct.

Dr. Allison’s goal is to develop methods that would make it possible for the first time to study such bacterial heterogeneity at the level of single cells, and the findings could accelerate development of new antibiotic treatments.

Read more on the Systems Biology website.