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A new NIH grant for innovative, early-career scientists has been awarded to three associate members of the Ó³»­´«Ã½ of MIT and Harvard. Nir Hacohen, Alan Saghatelian, and Levi Garraway are among the first recipients of the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award. The award is part of the NIH Roadmap for Medical Research initiative, which also supports the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award. The program aims to support exceptionally creative early-career scientists who take highly innovative approaches to major challenges in biomedical research. This is the first distribution of the award, which provides recipients with five-year grants of $1.5 million each. Out of more than 2,100 applicants, 29 were chosen based on scientific peer review and input from the directors of NIH institutes and centers.

Nir Hacohen, who is a senior associate member at the Ó³»­´«Ã½ and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Immunology and Inflammatory Diseases, will use the grant to support his research on how the immune system senses pathogens or molecules derived from them, focusing on the sensing of nucleic acids. Using new genome-scale RNA interference (RNAi) lentiviral libraries developed in collaboration with his colleagues in The RNAi Consortium (TRC), a public-private consortium based at the Ó³»­´«Ã½, Hacohen has developed a high-throughput method that enables loss-of-function genetic screens in human and mouse cells of the immune system. With his RNAi screening method, Hacohen, who is also a TRC principal investigator, will work to systematically dissect the genetic circuitry of the innate immune system. In addition, his team will investigate the role this system plays in protective immunity to infections as well as the development of inflammatory or autoimmune disorders.

Alan Saghatelian, who is also an assistant professor in the department of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University, was given the award to support his work developing advanced analytical chemistry approaches to characterize biomedically important enzymes. Levi Garraway, who is also an assistant professor at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, will apply his New Innovator award to a novel genetic and chemical screening approach to identify changes in malignant melanoma tumor cells that could be targets for new treatments.