An extraordinary milestone for a young lab
BME Assistant Professor Samagya Banskota and her lab have been awarded an NIH R35 Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA) from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS). This funding will support Banskota and her lab’s efforts to develop drug delivery technologies that advance gene editing and expand its transformative potential for treating rare diseases.
MIRA is a highly prestigious and very competitive award from the NIH, with BU typically receiving five or fewer awards each year. The goal of the Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award is to provide investigators with greater stability, flexibility and support for ambitious research projects. This long-term award allows investigators to approach problems more creatively, increasing the chances of important breakthroughs.
Banskota, an assistant professor in Biomedical Engineering, started her lab at BU just two and half years ago. She has already received numerous foundation awards for her work, including the Hartwell Investigator, a Faculty Starter Grant from the PhRMA Foundation, Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, and Mass Life Sciences (MLSC). But these grants work very differently from NIH awards, which are one of the most challenging and impactful awards to aim for. “Currently, there is uncertainty about NIH grants, and as a “young” lab this was my first attempt and because there is a lot of learning-by-doing, I went with that mindset,” says Banskota. “I took this as a challenge for myself, to put my research vision together, and get feedback from the community… So this was, in some ways, my journey of learning about how to communicate my research vision.”
After a very long review process, partly delayed by the federal government shutdown and congressional decisions surrounding NIH budget appropriations, her proposal was selected by NIH for funding.
It funds both the investigator and the research vision of the lab.”
This grant is not given to fund a particular project, but rather to fund the investigator’s vision as the lab moves forward. “It funds both the investigator and the research vision of the lab”, explains Banskota, and 5 years is a good amount of time to set that vision in motion. “You’re in the flow and you just have much more funding to do that. As a young lab, having that time and funding makes it possible to pursue high-risk, high-reward projects.”
The MIRA award will support Banskota and her lab as they continue developing new delivery technologies for next-generation therapeutics. Their work addresses one of the central challenges in gene editing and rare disease treatment: how to safely and effectively deliver powerful therapeutic molecules to the cells and tissues where they are needed the most.
By creating modular and programmable delivery platforms, the lab aims to expand the possibilities for treating genetic diseases that currently have limited therapeutic options. A major focus of the research is improving the precision of therapeutic delivery inside the body, where biological complexity can make it difficult to control where therapies go and how effectively they reach their targets.
Improving the precision of therapeutic delivery
“Many delivery systems tend to accumulate in the liver,” Banskota said. “We want to understand how these systems interact with the body’s biological environment, and how those interactions can be leveraged to direct therapeutics to the tissues that need them most.”
By combining insights from biology and engineering, Banskota’s lab hopes to build adaptable delivery technologies that could be applied across a range of genetic diseases.