LSU Mechanical Engineering’s Gartia Receives Nearly $2M National Institutes of Health Award

Manas GartiaJuly 31, 2023

BATON ROUGE, LA – LSU Mechanical Engineering Associate Professor Manas Gartia is the first LSU Engineering faculty to receive the NIH MIRA R35 award (National Institutes of Health Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award for Early Stage Investigators). The $1.875 million grant, the maximum amount one can receive from this award, will help him to develop spatial lipidomic techniques and investigate lipid-driven cell death in drug-resistant cancer. Lipidomics is the large-scale study of pathways and networks of cellular lipids in biological systems.

In the past five years, Gartia has made contributions to the spatial lipidomic field by implementing spectroscopy techniques, such as Raman spectroscopy, to investigate cell death.

“Cell death is a crucial physiological process,” he said. “The resistance of cancer cells to therapeutic drugs is a significant barrier to successful cancer treatment and the primary factor in cancer recurrence. Activation of novel cell death pathways would re-sensitize drug-resistant cells to chemotherapy.” 

Through the support of the MIRA award, Gartia’s research group will be integrating spatial lipidomics for the fundamental molecular understanding of ferroptosis, an alternate cell death mechanism. 

MIRA supports research in an investigator’s lab that falls within the mission of the NIH’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS). The goal of MIRA is to increase the efficiency of NIGMS funding by providing investigators with greater stability and flexibility, thereby enhancing scientific productivity and the chances for important breakthroughs. The program will also help distribute funding more widely among the nation’s highly talented and promising investigators.

Previously, Gartia has received the NSF CAREER Award and LSU Alumni Association Rising Faculty Research Award. 

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