In her scientific quest to improve treatments for people living with HIV, Johns Hopkins’ Eileen Scully has long held a strong commitment to both research and patient care. The holder of an M.D./Ph.D. from Yale, who trained at MIT and Harvard, Scully has since 2016 split her time between caring for patients in Hopkins’ Bartlett Clinic and building her translational research program. That work focuses on the impact of sex on immune responses to viral infections such as HIV.
“Earlier this year, I felt the momentum really shift for me,” Scully recalls. “I had secured a good amount of federal research funding and after what had felt like years of an uphill slog, I thought: ‘Wow, now I have the fuel to really advance these promising areas of inquiry.’”
But in March, the bottom dropped out after two large federal grants that supported her work were terminated. The affected projects examine how sex-specific hormone exposures may impact the HIV reservoir, the primary barrier to a cure for HIV. At the same time, additional funding for a planned project on HIV dynamics during pregnancy and menopause in women in Uganda was delayed by new federal restrictions. It’s work that could potentially lead to improved treatment in infectious diseases for both men and women everywhere.
“The funding disruption was a total earthquake in my own career, coupled with the much bigger cessation of USAID for health projects around the world, which felt so much bigger,” says Scully.
Then in June came some good news: Scully was among 11 promising clinician-scientists at Johns Hopkins to receive a CIM Next Generation Scholar Award. The awards are made possible thanks to funding from generous CIM donors, including Sarah Miller Coulson, who is funding Scully’s work.
“They are bright lights in their fields, who have the potential to make real advances.” – Nadia Hansel
The Next Generation Scholars program was created to support outstanding early-career faculty who are innovators in the areas of research, education and clinical care. The selection process is very rigorous. CIM is accepting applications three times per year. Applicants must explain how the work they are proposing will fortify medicine as a public trust, and identify a senior faculty member who will mentor their work. Each CIM Next Generation Scholar is eligible to receive up to $300,000 of funding over three years. From the 24 applicants who submitted proposals last spring, 11 recipients — hand-picked by leaders in specialties across the school of medicine — were selected.
“They are bright lights in their fields, who have the potential to make real advances,” says Nadia Hansel, director of the Department of Medicine. “We need to invest in our best and our brightest now more than ever,” she adds, citing the recent cuts and interruptions in federal research funding, as well as increasing financial pressures on health care and academic medicine.
“It’s hard for me to overstate the importance of this award and its timing,” says Scully. “It’s been incredible, really allowing me to hone in on the questions where we will have the most impact.”
In creating the Next Generation Scholars program, leaders were very intentional in targeting the support to clinician-researchers who are early in their careers. “This is where funding can make the biggest influence, where an early investment can give young faculty the boost they need to launch their careers,” says Hansel.
That is certainly the case for Leslie Miller & Richard Worley CIM Next Generation Scholar Bipasha Mukherjee-Clavin, an assistant professor of neurology whose research focuses on the progressive neurodegenerative condition known as Charcot-Marie-Tooth (CMT) disease.
“There is a lot of momentum-building during this early career stage,” she says. “If one good thing happens — one small grant or one new source of support — that success feeds on itself and starts to open more doors. It’s an outsized impact.”
“There is a lot of momentum-building during this early career stage. If one good thing happens — one small grant or one new source of support — that success feeds on itself and starts to open more doors.” – Bipasha Mukherjee-Clavin
Despite its unusual name, Charcot-Marie-Tooth is a “remarkably common” form of peripheral neuropathy that is thought to affect about 1 in 2,500 people in the United States, Mukherjee-Clavin says. In her early research, she was on a team that created one of the first stem cell models of the disease. More recently she has moved into using animal models to better understand the biology behind the most common form of CMT.
“There are 130 different genes identified with CMT but about half of people have CMT1A, which involves a duplication of the PMT22 gene,” she explains. The funding will also advance her investigations into studying whether therapeutic interventions are best targeted early, or later, in the progression of CMT. These are questions with important implications for the millions of people worldwide who suffer from this debilitating condition.
“This is an important population to help because at present there are no disease-modifying treatments for this disease,” Mukherjee-Clavin says. “We treat the symptoms, through the use of leg braces and tools to help with opening jars, for example, but these are imperfect strategies since being able to walk and use your hands is so important to functioning in this world.”
The funding that comes with her Next Generation Scholar award “came at a very, very important time for my career development,” she says.
Looking across the broad variety of specialties touched by the Next Generation Scholars funding, Nadia Hansel says she has renewed excitement for the future and the potential for truly game-changing advances in research, education and patient care.
“There is a very beautiful alignment between CIM and the Department of Medicine because our core values — that medicine is a public trust — are well entwined.” – Nadia Hansel
“There is a very beautiful alignment between CIM and the Department of Medicine because our core values — that medicine is a public trust — are well entwined,” says Hansel. “By partnering together through the Next Generation Scholars program we can double down on our shared mission. I’m very excited about the partnership!”
