The NIH has awarded Royce Mohan, who is a professor of neuroscience at UConn Health, a new R01 grant to study the mechanisms of corneal damage and sensory loss caused by exposure to chemical threat agents. His research team, jointly led by co-investigator Paola Bargagna-Mohan, will advance state-of-the-art methods that combine transgenic and gene knockout systems with proteomic and transcriptomic approaches to study chemical injury to the sensory system of the cornea. This innovative research hopes to illuminate new biomarkers and effectors that could provide insights to druggable targets. This effort is supported by the CounterACT program, a Trans-NIH initiative in Translational Research, including the Office of the Director of the NIH and the National Eye Institute. The increased risk of a terrorist attack in the United States involving chemical agents has created new challenges (https://www.ninds.nih.gov/current-research/trans-agency-activities/counteract-program) and, as such, there is a dire need to discover countermeasures against such threat agents that could cause civilian mass casualties. The Mohan lab’s research is part of this high priority area of homeland security.
