3 from WashU receive prestigious NIH Director’s awards

Three researchers from Washington University in St. Louis have received highly competitive and prestigious NIH Director’s awards, totaling $10 million in “High Risk, High Reward” medical research funding to be used over the next five years. Those researchers include: 

Hong Chen, associate professor of biomedical engineering in the McKelvey School of Engineering and of neurosurgery in the School of Medicine, was one of only eight nationwide receiving the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s Pioneer Award, which provides $5.4 million for her to use ultrasound to induce a hibernation-like state in mammals. 

Adam Kepecs, PhD, the Robert J. Terry Professor of Neuroscience and a professor of Psychiatry at Washington University School of Medicine also received a Pioneer Award with $3.5 million in funding over five years. His lab will use the funds to study how the brain’s neural circuits decode signals from the immune system and orchestrate adjustments in behavior and motivation. 

Maria Catalina Camacho, PhD, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry at WashU Medicine received the NIH Director’s Early Independence Award. This year, the award provides $1.25 million over five years to, according to the NIH, “promising, newly graduated scientists with the intellect, scientific creativity, drive and maturity” to take an accelerated path to an independent research career. She will be studying the neurobiological underpinnings that place some children at risk for developing anxiety or depressive symptoms. 

High Risk, High Reward

The National Institutes of Health’s High-Risk, High-Reward Research program awarded 67 new research grants this year. According to the NIH Announcement, these awards “enable exceptionally creative scientists to potentially transform biomedical science.” 

Four WashU scientists last received this award in 2021. 

Chen published results of her initial work using ultrasound to induce torpor, or a hibernation-like state, in Nature Metabolism in 2023. Chen and a multidisciplinary team induced a hibernation-like state in mice by using ultrasound to stimulate the hypothalamus preoptic area in the brain, which helps to regulate body temperature and metabolism. In addition to the mouse, which naturally goes into torpor, Chen and her team induced torpor in a rat, which does not. Their findings showed the first noninvasive and safe method to induce a hibernation-like state by targeting the central nervous system. 

“Our overarching goal is to pioneer a platform technique that harnesses ultrasound for the noninvasive and safe induction of artificial hibernation, thereby catalyzing disruptive medical innovations,” Chen said.

A BJC Investigator at WashU Medicine, Kepecs is renowned for his work on brain circuits involved in cognition and decision making, and how these circuits can produce psychiatric symptoms. The Pioneer Award will support his pursuit of an intriguing hypothesis: that immune signals, such as cytokines, are sensed by brain circuits and contribute to mood disorders such as depression. By pursuing how the immune system interacts with neural circuits that are involved in psychiatric disorders, Kepecs and his lab are sailing into unfamiliar waters, seeking to discover how conditions such as depression emerge – and perhaps how to alleviate them.

 “If we can identify the relevant neural circuits, we can gain insight into how the brain communicates with the immune system,” said Kepecs, “and open immediate opportunities for developing targeted drugs for depression and related conditions.”

 Camacho’s research focuses on how the human brain makes sense of a person’s social and emotional worlds. The grant will help fund a study that will test a computational model of how early experiences shape emotional neurodevelopment. To build such a model, Camacho’s lab will collect data from 3- and 4-year-old children.

“By doing this, we can test hypotheses about how early social experiences shape our brains to learn how to understand emotions,” Camacho said. “We think that early emotional neurodevelopment can set up a child to be more or less vulnerable to developing anxiety or depressive symptoms later in life, so this is an important basic scientific step to understanding how depression and anxiety emerge.”

Beth Miller, Mark Reynolds and Kristin Saurwein contributed to this story. Visit the McKelvey School of Engineering website for more about Hong Chen and WashU Medicine News for more details about Kepecs‘ and Camacho’s research