Dr. Ekaterina Heldwein has received the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director's New Innovator Award. The award honors her research and comes with a $1.5 million grant to be distributed over five years.
Heldwein, an assistant professor of microbiology and molecular biology at the Tufts School of Medicine and the Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences, researches herpesviruses using structural and biophysical approaches to discover how they enter host cells.
"I am honored to receive recognition from [the] NIH at this early stage of the research and look forward to contributing more to research on herpesviruses," she said in a press release. She could not be reached for an interview because she is currently on maternity leave.
Heldwein is one of 29 scientists out of 2,100 applicants who received the award, which is funded through the NIH Roadmap Common Fund.
It is given to researchers who are in the early stages of their careers for their "highly innovative approaches that have the potential to produce an unusually high impact," according to the NIH's Web site.
Stephen Harrison, the head of the Laboratory of Structural Cell Biology at Harvard, oversaw Heldwein's fellowship at Children's Hospital Boston and said that his former student deserves the recognition.
"[She] is a daring and creative young scientist whose talents and promise are appropriately recognized by the NIH Innovator Award," he said. "I look forward to many important discoveries as her laboratory pursues its research."
There is little known about herpesviruses even though they cause common diseases like mononucleosis and chicken pox, "partially because of their complexity," Heldwein said in the release. They cause symptoms that range from cold sores to blindness and cancers.
Heldwein's proposed goal in her NIH abstract is "to understand in atomic-level detail how herpesviruses enter hosts."
Herpesviruses infect their hosts for life, and eight of them infect humans. Unlike bacteria, viruses are not cells. They are DNA or RNA genomes wrapped in a protein coat.
Understanding the protein coat is essential in blocking the contact between viruses and host cells. Since scientists cannot attack viruses without attacking host cells after infection, the only defense is to resist infection. If Heldwein's research is successful, antiviral drugs can serve that purpose.
According to Dr. Michael Rosenblatt, the dean of Tufts' medical school, the New Innovators Award will help further Heldwein's work and encourage more research at Tufts into infectious diseases.
"The end goal is to benefit people who suffer from any of these viruses," he said in a press release.
