Dr. Steven Boeynaems receives NIH Innovator Award of $2.4M

Dr. Steven Boeynaems, assistant professor of Molecular and Human Genetics at Baylor and Investigator at the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute at Texas Children’s Hospital, has been awarded the National Institutes of Health Director’s New Innovator Award. The award, a part of the NIH Common Fund’s High-Risk, High-Reward Research program, supports unusually innovative research from early career investigators.  Dr. Boeynaems work will focus on the role of neuroinflammation in neurodegenerative diseases like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and Alzheimer’s disease. In people with these conditions, the brain’s immune cells enter a hyperinflammatory state in response to a build-up of protein clumps in the brain, leaving these cells unable to perform their normal support function for neurons and even harming them. After decades of these immune cells attempting to fight these proteins, the neurons eventually begin to die.

“We are starting to understand that the protein pathology in the brain triggers neuroinflammation because it mimics the molecular features of an infection. If you look at the structure of these proteins and how they interact with immune cells, it’s the same as how bacterial and viral proteins would interact,” said Boeynaems, a member of the Center for Alzheimer’s and Neurodegenerative Diseases, the Dan L Duncan Comprehensive Cancer Center and the Therapeutic Innovation Center at Baylor and a CPRIT Scholar.

Building on preliminary findings in his lab, Boeynaems will study how neuropathology mimics infectious disease and how the innate immune system responds. He will study neutralizing mechanisms that bacteria use to hide from the immune system to explore whether it is possible to use similar strategies to intervene and calm down the immune response in neurodegenerative disease. 

“Inflammation is involved in many other diseases, including autoimmune disease and cardiovascular disease,” Boeynaems said. “We believe that the concepts we are studying here are going to be applicable across many different types of disease.”