Assistant Professor John Finan receives NSF CAREER Award to investigate traumatic brain injury
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Assistant Professor John Finan received a prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER Award to study how a genetic variant affects traumatic brain injury.
CAREER awards support early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education. Finan’s $599,999 award will fund his project, “CAREER: An investigation of the role of Piezo1 polymorphisms in traumatic brain injury pathology using isogenic human in vitro models.”
The human body contains the Piezo1 protein, which allows cells to feel mechanical forces such as stress, strain, and trauma. Cells use Piezo1 to drive the sense of touch and to direct joints, muscles, and tendons to gain strength when they are overloaded.
But one genetic variant of the Piezo1 gene, E756del, makes individuals highly sensitive to mechanical loads. For example, athletes with this variant develop stronger tendons, enabling them to run faster and jump farther than others. But individuals with the variant may also have an excessive response to mechanical load on the brain associated with concussion and traumatic brain injury.
“I want to understand how the E756del variation affects brain cells during injury,” Finan said. “I think it may cause worse outcomes after someone sustains a traumatic brain injury.”
The professor and his team in the Finan Lab at UIC plan to make human stem cells – derived from blood draws, not embryos – and split them into two populations that are nearly genetically identical. One group, however, will have the single genetic difference the research team is interested in.
“We will turn the stem cells into brain organoids – little balls of living, communicating brain cells – subject them to trauma in a petri dish, and measure how their health declines afterward,” Finan said. “These experiments are part of our larger effort to understand why some people recover well after a traumatic brain injury while others have persistent, debilitating symptoms.”
The research will create opportunities for UIC graduate students to learn about human brain organoid models, a rapidly expanding area of neuroscience research. It will also create undergraduate research opportunities.
“This area tends to be interesting to undergraduates because many of them have witnessed widely varying outcomes from mild traumatic brain injury events among their peers in high school sports programs,” Finan said.
In addition, the project includes a comprehensive education and outreach plan to engage high school students through hands-on demonstrations and activities to understand how genes and trauma together contribute to traumatic brain injuries.