Wright Center welcomes three inaugural C. Kenneth and Dianne Wright Physician-Scientist Scholars
By Anne Dreyfuss
VCU C. Kenneth and Dianne Wright Center for Clinical and Translational Research
A new program made possible by a $4 million endowment established by longtime Virginia Commonwealth University benefactor C. Kenneth Wright is connecting the next generation of health sciences researchers with the resources and training they need to support their work.
The C. Kenneth and Dianne Wright Physician-Scientist Scholars Program welcomed its inaugural class earlier this year. The program that is open to VCU School of Medicine M.D.-Ph.D. students in their second year or further of graduate school training offsets the students’ tuition, fees, and stipends during medical school years. It also provides the students with up to $3,000 each year, which can be applied toward travel to a meeting to present results of their clinical or translational research, defraying the cost of a United States Medical Licensing Examination, or defraying the cost of residency program interviews. Additionally, it can be applied to partially defer medical school tuition and stipend costs for each scholar.
“The students were selected on the basis of their outstanding proposals for translational or clinical research projects,” said M.D.-Ph.D. program director Michael Donnenberg, M.D. VCU School of Medicine professor emeritus and former M.D.-Ph.D. program director Gordon Archer, M.D., chaired the committee that reviewed program applicants and selected three students for the awards based on their application’s scientific merit, feasibility and translational emphasis.
Fourth-year Ph.D. student Teja Devarakonda will study how the heart functions during a heart attack.
“Heart attacks damage the heart muscle tissue and impair the heart’s ability to provide blood to bodily organs,” he said.
With support from the Wright Physician-Scientist Scholars Program, Devarakonda and his research team will investigate the protective properties of a pregnancy-associated hormone called relaxin, which previous studies have shown as effective at reducing damage to cardiac tissues over time after a heart attack.
“My project specifically involves studying the protective effects of over-expressing a receptor for relaxin in a mammalian heart via a gene therapy-based approach after a heart attack,” Devarakonda said. “We hope the research can lead to further insight into translational approaches to benefit patients suffering from heart attacks and heart failure.”
After graduating, Devarakonda plans to pursue a residency in internal medicine and would like to specialize in cardiology. “The Physician-Scientist Scholars Program will provide me with the necessary framework for training and financial support as I progress through the rest of the M.D.-Ph.D. program,” he said.
Third-year Ph.D. student Graeme Murray already applied a portion of the scholarship funding to pay for travel to meet with a research team at the University of California Los Angeles Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, where he helped a research team build a microscope to help doctors determine if a cancer patient will benefit from a given therapy. The microscope, which Murray helped develop with his research team at VCU, tracks changes in mass of tens of thousands of single cells from patient tumors.
“If single cells from the patient are resistant to a given therapy, the cells will continue to grow in mass,” Murray said. “But if the cells are sensitive to the therapy, they will decrease in mass over time and die.”
The screening methodology allows his research team to identify sub-populations of resistant cells that have been shown to lead to drug resistance in patients. He hopes for the methodology to one day be used by doctors to inform therapy choices.
“With success, doctors will be able to identify patients who will benefit from a given therapy before trying it,” Murray said. “This could ensure patients receive the optimal therapy for their cancer.”
In the coming years, Murray hopes to apply funding from the scholarship toward attending the American Association for Cancer Research and Cancer Research UK’s joint conference on engineering and physical sciences in oncology. “The Physician-Scientist Scholars Program has allowed me to travel across the country to work with collaborators,” he said. “In the future, it will allow me to travel to conferences to share our work and learn from others in the field of oncology research.”
Eric Kwong, who has completed the graduate school training portion of the M.D.-Ph.D. program and is in his third year of medical school training, will apply the scholarship to support his research aimed at modulating a specific enzyme to reduce liver disease severity. Through the course of his research, he will test drug compounds in mice in an attempt to improve disease progression.
“The goal of my research is to understand the disease process that leads to irreversible liver injury, scarring, and non-functioning liver,” Kwong said. Non-alcoholic liver disease and alcoholic liver disease are the most common liver diseases worldwide, but no effective pharmacologic treatments exist for them. “Ultimately, I want to contribute to the development of therapeutic drugs that can reduce or reverse the disease progression,” he said.
After graduating, Kwong plans to pursue a medical residency and specialize in gastroenterology. “I want to take care of patients who have various gastrointestinal and liver diseases while conducting translational research for the development of novel treatment options for diseases that we do not yet have cures,” he said. “The Physician-Scientist Scholars Program will help me extend the fundamental scientific findings I have discovered in the laboratory and test those ideas in mice, with the goal of discovering potential drug targets for non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and alcoholic liver disease.”
In addition to the $4 million Physician-Scientist Scholars Program endowment, Wright’s $16 million gift to name the Wright Center in 2015 established six Distinguished Chairs in Clinical and Translational Research.
“Mr. Wright’s support has enabled us to aid VCU in recruiting distinguished researchers from around the country, in addition to helping us prepare the best and brightest students for careers along the spectrum of translational science,” said Wright Center director F. Gerard Moeller, M.D.
Categories Education, Research