Researcher Wins $1.6 Million NIH Award for Outstanding Investigators
Vijay Parashar
Structural biologist Vijay Parashar last month received an NIH-NIGMS Outstanding Investigator award of $1.6 million for his research on bacterial signal transduction mechanisms.
The multi-year award, given by the National Institute of Health-National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIH-NIGMS), was distributed nationwide to 70 researchers this year with the goal of fostering "important breakthroughs," according to NIH-NIGMS.
"The program will distribute funding.. among the nation's highly talented and promising investigators,'' stated the institute.
Parashar's research delves into the mechanics of how certain signaling proteins trigger drug resistance and biofilm formation in bacteria, including Streptococcus mutans, a leading causative agent in dental caries. According to Parashar, if scientists can decode the bacterial signaling processes at molecular level, they might be able to abort the chain of events that results in disease.
“Then you don’t have to eradicate the bacteria—you can design a small molecule that turns off a particular switch, a signaling protein,” Parashar explains. “This way you stop bacteria from doing precisely what you don’t want them to do.”
Since proteins are submicroscopic molecules that can’t be seen under a microscope, Parashar uses a specialized technique called X-ray crystallography to build three-dimensional representations of them so he can determine how they function.
Unlike awards that fund very specific projects or proposals, the Outstanding Investigator awards support researchers' broader focus, allowing them to change course depending on their findings, as long as the research falls under the umbrella of more general NIGMS mission. "It lets you to be flexible and pursue more productive and exciting new research directions as you go,'' says Parashar, who joined the RSDM faculty as an assistant professor in 2014.
Dr. Parashar has also received a $37,000 Charles & Johanna Busch Biomedical Grant to develop inhibitors targeting bacterial signaling.
