Feroz R. Papa
Feroz R. Papa, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of medicine at UCSF who is developing new therapies for diabetes, has been named a recipient of the 2007 National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director's New Innovator Award.
The New Innovator Award program supports exceptionally creative early-career scientists who take highly innovative - and potentially transformative - approaches to major challenges in biomedical research. More than 2,100 applications were received for this extremely competitive program.
Papa, one of 29 awardees, is a cell biologist as well as an endocrinologist who treats diabetic patients at San Francisco General Hospital. Papa's lab group, which is based in the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences, or QB3, at UCSF Mission Bay, studies a newly recognized group of diseases caused by protein misfolding in an internal cellular compartment called the endoplasmic reticulum (ER). Healthy cells fold proteins properly in their ERs, but if proteins misfold or aggregate in the ER, the cell becomes damaged and eventually commits suicide. Type 2 diabetes, as well as some neurodegenerative diseases, might be caused in part by such "ER stress." Papa uses molecular tools to prevent the buildup of malfunctioning proteins in insulin-producing beta cells of the pancreas.
Papa's lab constructs tools to measure the ER-stressed state in individual living cells within populations, and studies how to make cells more resistant to the dangerous effects of ER stress by discovering drugs to augment the cells' natural defenses. For his NIH new innovator research, Papa will utilize these new tools to test and expand our current knowledge of ER stress-related diseases, such as type 2 diabetes, and thereby develop new therapeutic approaches for these disorders.
Papa is a faculty member of the
UCSF Diabetes Center,
QB3 and the
UCSF Department of Medicine. He has graduate faculty affiliations in the UCSF
PIBS Tetrad Cell Biology Program and in the
Biomedical Sciences Graduate Program.
NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni, MD, announced the 2007 award recipients at the start of the NIH Director's Pioneer Award Symposium on Sept. 19. The award recipients will each receive $1.5 million in direct costs over five years.
Zerhouni is making a major investment in the future of science with five-year grants totaling more than $105 million to exceptionally innovative investigators, many of whom are in the early stages of their careers.
"Novel ideas and new investigators are essential ingredients for scientific progress, and the creative scientists we recognize with NIH Director's Pioneer Awards and NIH Director's New Innovator Awards are well-positioned to make significant - and potentially transformative - discoveries in a variety of areas," Zerhouni said.
"The conceptual and technological breakthroughs that are likely to emerge from their highly innovative approaches to major research challenges could speed progress toward important medical advances," he added.
This is the first group of New Innovator Awards, which are part of an NIH Roadmap for Medical Research initiative that tests new approaches to supporting research. New Innovator Awards are reserved for new investigators who have not received an NIH regular research or similar grant.
The NIH Roadmap for Medical Research is a series of far-reaching initiatives designed to transform the nation's medical research capabilities and speed the movement of research discoveries from the bench to the bedside. It provides a framework of the priorities the NIH must address in order to optimize its entire research portfolio, and lays out a vision for a more efficient and productive system of medical research. The Office of the Director, the central office at NIH, is responsible for setting policy for NIH, which includes 27 institutes and centers.
The NIH - the nation's medical research agency - is a component of the US. Department of Health and Human Services. It is the primary federal agency for conducting and supporting basic, clinical and translational medical research, and investigates the causes, treatments and cures for both common and rare diseases.
Related Links:
Diabetes Center
NIH Roadmap
National Institutes of Health
