Ari Green
The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) has announced that Ari Green, MD, assistant professor in the Department of Neurology and alumnus of the HHMI Medical Fellows Program, was selected as one of 19 early career physician-scientists whose work the institute finds critical to the development of clinical therapies.
The award supports Green’s investigation into the optic nerve to help understand why patients with multiple sclerosis (MS), a degenerative disease of the central nervous system, suffer irreversible injury to their nerve cells.
“Inflammation of the optic nerve can be the first symptom of MS,” Green said. “By examining retinal injury in tissue samples and a mouse model, we’ve already shown that damage to the visual pathway is extremely common in the disease, and the injury extends to parts of the retina that were previously thought to be unaffected.”
Green plans to probe the role of a specific protein in the destruction of these nerve cells, and to initiate studies that may reveal which genes are turned on or off before a nerve cell dies.
“In the past few years, Ari Green has burst upon the international scene and quickly emerged as one of our most accomplished young physician-scientists,” said Stephen L. Hauser, MD, professor and chair of UCSF’s Department of Neurology. “It is outstanding that the Howard Hughes Medical Institute has made this wonderful commitment to his research program. These new funds will permit Ari to apply an important series of bedside observations to the laboratory bench. His work embodies a bedside-to-bench-and-back-again paradigm that must be encouraged if we are to find answers to serious and common medical problems.”
According to HHMI, the Early Career Physician-Scientist award supports physicians who are beginning their independent research careers with less than two years in a tenure-track position. The award provides $375,000 over a five-year period to help physician-scientists develop their research programs during a stage in their careers when clinical demands make time scarce for research.
“We think the most valuable thing we can give them is time,” said Peter J. Bruns, PhD, HHMI’s vice president for grants and special programs.
The $75,000-per-year award is used for direct research expenses such as equipment purchases, and does not support the awardee’s salary. HHMI requires that awardees spend at least 70 percent of their time doing research.
“I’m very honored and excited to have received this award because it allows me to develop a laboratory program to complement our clinically based research,” said Green. “Understanding why neurons are permanently injured in MS will enable us to work on developing treatments to halt the devastating disability that afflicts our patients.”
The physician-scientists in this group are a rare breed among newly minted doctors, according to the HHMI announcement. Recent advances in biomedical research make translating basic science into patient care particularly promising, but the number of students entering translational research has remained flat. For many physician-scientists, the deciding factor in whether to pursue an academic research career is the ability to successfully set up their first lab.
