Jewel Awarded 2024 SoM Dean's Fellowship

Postdoctoral Fellow Jewel Banik was awarded a Summer 2024 School of Medicine Dean's Postdoctoral Fellowship for his proposal What controls the expression of the Gerozyme 15-PGDH, a master regulator of muscle aging? The School of Medicine Dean’s Postdoctoral Fellowships encourage and support young investigators in the first two years of their postdoctoral research training at the School of Medicine.

The goal of Jewel's project is to understand, at the molecular level, why 15-PGDH levels naturally increase with aging. Muscles require signals from nerves to contract, and the connections between muscles and nerves can break and reform, especially after injury. When this connection between muscles and nerves is broken due to injury or aging, 15-PGDH levels rise. Jewel's data show that after the connection between the muscle and nerve is lost, a molecule called Runx1 binds to the DNA close to the 15-PGDH gene. His hypothesis is that Runx1 must bind this part of DNA for 15-PGDH to be made and that blocking this binding could stop the excess 15-PGDH production that accompanies aging. This would allow the PGE2 level in aged muscle to remain similar to that in young muscle. If his hypothesis is correct, it will allow him to design drugs that preserve muscles from wasting and improve the quality of life for people aged 65 and older.