{"id":16611,"date":"2022-10-04T13:30:10","date_gmt":"2022-10-04T17:30:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/?p=16611"},"modified":"2022-10-04T13:30:10","modified_gmt":"2022-10-04T17:30:10","slug":"geisel-researcher-receives-prestigious-national-institutes-of-health-new-innovator-award","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/2022\/geisel-researcher-receives-prestigious-national-institutes-of-health-new-innovator-award\/","title":{"rendered":"Geisel Researcher Receives Prestigious National Institutes of Health New Innovator Award"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Aaron<\/a>
Aaron McKenna, PhD. Photo by Kurt Wehde<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Aaron McKenna, PhD, an assistant professor of molecular and systems biology at the Geisel School of Medicine, is the recipient of a $1.5 million National Institutes of Health (NIH) New Innovator Award given annually by the NIH Director\u2019s Office to exceptionally creative scientists proposing high-risk, high-impact research.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Created in 2007 to accelerate the pace of biomedical, behavioral, and social science discoveries that may have a significant impact on an important biomedical or behavioral research problem, the NIH award program identifies scientists with high-impact ideas pursuing highly innovative research. McKenna is among 72 early investigators to receive this year\u2019s award.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"It's a wonderful\u202fhonor to receive\u202fthe NIH New Innovator Award. We started the lab right before the pandemic, so it's been hard to dream big about our scientific impact,\u201d McKenna says. \u201cThis award asks us to do just that\u2014to aggressively push forward our lineage technologies to better understand the evolution of cell types in both development as well as diseases such as cancer. We couldn't be more excited.\"<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

McKenna\u2019s laboratory focuses on understanding how cells choose their fate within an organism and how these fates are linked together. The choice of what cell to become is tightly controlled, creating the proper cell type at the correct time and place within the body. Yet it has been difficult to decipher the exact combination of factors that program these fates and ever harder to create comprehensive maps of this process.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Single-cell sequencing efforts offer a potential to answer many of these questions, McKenna says, yet it\u2019s impossible to imagine sampling every cell over the continuum of time or sampling all cells from every phenotype. \u201cWhat we\u2019ve needed is biological \u2018scaffolding\u2019, a way to link cells throughout time and space,\u201d he says. \u201cWe\u2019ve developed technologies that create such maps, also called a lineage tree. Lineage trees describe the pattern of cell divisions that creates every cell in an organism all the way back to the founding single cell.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

A core goal woven throughout this project is to improve the publicly available lineage tracing software\u2014to develop tools that aim to reconstruct the full histories of individual cells from only their terminal state. The McKenna lab\u2019s dual expertise in computational biology and molecular biology technology development makes them uniquely positioned to make groundbreaking steps in lineage tracing and molecular biology.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cOur cellular \u2018time machine\u2019 works by recording, in real-time, events and relationships into a cell\u2019s DNA that are passed down through the cellular generations,\u201d he explains. \u201cUsing<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>advances in single-cell sequencing, genome engineering, and cellular modeling, we plan to dissect mouse development using both lineage tracing technologies and molecular recording systems.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Understanding how cell fates regulates cell state is central to many questions in medicine and biology. \u201cA number of recent efforts, including our own, have traced cell fate with lineage techniques in cancer, revealing vulnerabilities and evolutionary trajectories of the disease,\u201d McKenna says. \u201cOur goal is to expand these technologies to map cell relationships in normal development. We can then use these maps to better understand how diseases such as cancer repurpose normal development and how these dependencies can be exploited to improve patient outcomes.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe science advanced by these researchers is poised to blaze new paths of discovery in human health,\u201d said Lawrence A. Tabak, D.D.S., Ph.D., who performs the duties of the director of NIH. \u201cThis unique cohort of scientists will transform what is known in the biological and behavioral world. We are privileged to support this innovative science.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Founded in 1797, the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth strives to improve the lives of the communities it serves through excellence in learning, discovery, and healing. The Geisel School of Medicine is renowned for its leadership in medical education, healthcare policy and delivery science, biomedical research, global health, and in creating innovations that improve lives worldwide. As one of America\u2019s leading medical schools, Dartmouth\u2019s Geisel School of Medicine is committed to training new generations of diverse leaders who will help solve our most vexing challenges in healthcare.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Given annually to promising early-stage investigators pursuing highly innovative research, Assistant Professor Aaron McKenna receives the prestigious NIH New Innovator Award.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":14919,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[1094],"class_list":["post-16611","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-aaron-mckenna","author-12"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2021\/06\/McKenna_featured.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4r3h1-4jV","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16611","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16611"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16611\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16612,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16611\/revisions\/16612"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14919"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16611"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16611"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}