Erik Shapiro Hopes To Enhance MRI Technology With New Innovator Award from the NIH

Erik M. Shapiro, assistant professor of diagnostic radiology and biomedical engineering at the Yale School of Medicine, has been awarded a $1.5 million New Innovator Award by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Shapiro is working on developing new ways to enhance cellular and molecular magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technology to allow scientists to observe, measure and even manipulate cell migration in living tissue.

The New Innovator Awards cover laboratory costs over a five-year period and are given to young researchers who have not yet received NIH research grants. This year, NIH awarded 47 scientists $138 million under its New Innovator and Pioneer Award programs.

“This award will allow us the freedom to take a high risk/high reward approach to a novel type of stem cell therapy, namely the biochemical steering of endogenous, adult multi-potential cell migration,” Shapiro says. “The use of MRI to monitor these experiments is important because, if these procedures prove successful, we can further implement the same imaging methodologies in translation to primate and human studies.”

The work above was funded, fully or in part, by the Yale Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) grant from the National Center for Research Resources at the National Institutes of Health.