Professor Receives Hefty Grant

A professor at the Harvard Medical School (HMS) has been awarded a $500,000 five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to conduct cell biology research that may have significant repercussions on future treatments of neural diseases like Parkinson’s and Huntington’s.

Professor of Cell Biology Junying Yuan is one of 13 recipients of this year’s NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, the results of which will be officially announced at an NIH Symposium this morning. The grant is intended to fund chancey biomedical research in unexplored areas.

Yuan said she thought the innovative aspects of her project helped her to earn the grant.

“[The award] was specifically aiming for research that had not been done anywhere before,” Yuan said. Applicants were assessed both on past research accomplishments and their specific research proposal.

In her past research, Yuan has worked to understand the roles of proteins and genes controlling ‘apoptosis,’ or cell suicide. This has repercussions for chronic neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s, which are caused by excessive apoptosis in the brain.

The project for which Yuan received funding will carry this work further, into work on the influences of aging on neurodegenerative diseases.

“[Professor Yuan] is trying to connect two different fields, aging and neurodegenerative diseases,” said Caroline H. Yi, a graduate student at Yuan’s laboratory. “Her hypothesis is that the aging process is somehow promoting the toxicity of mutant proteins in neurodegenerative diseases.”

According to Yi, Yuan’s new project is based on a related model previously indicating that a mutant protein was involved in age-dependent hearing loss.

Michael S. Boyce ’05, who just finished his Ph.D. under Yuan, said her research team hopes to find chemicals that will inhibit the proliferation of neural degeneration.

“We will be screening through a large library of chemicals that would promote normal protein at the expense of mutant protein,” he said.

Yuan is perhaps best known for research showing that the abnormal repetition of a protein called polyglutamine in cells led to an overactivation of the enzyme caspase-8—which is critically involved in apoptosis. These results suggested that the mutant protein helped accelerate cell death and degeneration in neural diseases.

“We don’t know how cells specifically recognise these proteins,” Yuan said, “but we believe that we have a hint of a cellular mechanism that responds [to them].”

If Yuan could establish a concrete link between mutant proteins and neurodegenerative diseases, she said, medicine might one day be able to remove these proteins from young people at risk.

This is only the second year that the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award has existed. It marks a new provision, in the traditionally conservative grant system, for “individual scientists of exceptional creativity who propose pioneering approaches to major contemporary challenges in biomedical research,” according to the NIH website.

Yuan said she is aware of the pressure that she and the other recipients will be under to prove that such a high-risk strategy is worthwhile.

“I am very excited to start a new area, research that has not been previously explored,” Yuan said. “But when proposing something entirely new there are also risks involved.”

—Staff writer Alexandra C. Bell can be reached at acbell@fas.harvard.edu.