USC Mann faculty maintained their leadership in grants for pioneering research in 2023.
• Serghei Mangul was awarded a $3.9 million National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant to develop robust, scalable genomics tools and databases for analyzing immune receptor repertoires across diverse populations, and $500,000 to help provide big data skills to biology students at community colleges and minority-serving institutions.
• J. Andrew MacKay and Sarah Hamm-Alvarez were awarded nearly $3 million in renewed NIH funding for nanomedicines aimed at Sjogren’s Syndrome.
• Yong (Tiger) Zhang was awarded a $2.5 million NIH grant to develop therapeutic candidates for triple-negative breast cancer.
• Zhipeng Lu garnered a $2.2 million NIH grant to target RNA structures in potentially treating neurological diseases.
• Dima Qato was awarded $1.65 million to investigate structural racism’s effects on Medicare Part D, pharmacy closures and medication adherence, and $430,000 to assess barriers to the retail availability of the opioid-used medication buprenorphine.
• William Padula was awarded a $500,000 PhRMA Frontier Award in Value Assessment to analyze the effectiveness of the GRACE model in valuing cancer therapies.
• Annie Wong-Beringer was awarded a $364,140 grant from Merck for investigating ESBL-Enterobacterales to reveal the drivers of antibiotic resistance.
• Julio Camarero was awarded a $375,000 grant from the Melanoma Research Alliance to examine the effectiveness of a cyclotide discovered by his lab in treating skin cancer.