Mingnan Chen Awarded NIH NIAID R01
Congratulations to Dr. Mingnan Chen and team on their newly awarded NIH grant "Deciphering the Interplay of Depleting Anti-PD-1 Antibodies and Autoimmune Environments in Type-1 Diabetes: Towards Better Utility of Therapeutic Antibody!"
Antibodies are widely investigated and used as therapeutic agents and functional biomaterials for the treatment of type 1 diabetes and other autoimmune diseases. Two important insights have emerged from these efforts: disease stage and the mechanism of action of antibody-based therapies critically influence treatment outcomes. Although these observations may seem intuitive, they have not been systematically studied to generate the mechanistic understanding needed to guide future design and application of antibody-based interventions.
With support from a new R01 grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Dr. Chen’s team in Molecular Pharmaceutics at the University of Utah will investigate these mechanisms with systematic approach such as scRNA-seq as well as cell type-specific tools. The project was initiated and driven by an outstanding former graduate student of Chen Lab, Dr. Yujia Zhai, and will be conducted in collaboration with Drs. Shuyun Dong, Venkata (Kash) Yellepeddi, Zoe Raleigh, Dean Tantin, and Xiangyang Ye.
