PHILADELPHIA - Rahul M. Kohli, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of Medicine and Biochemistry & Biophysics, is one of the recipients of a New Innovator Award from National Institutes of Health (NIH).
The NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, totaling $1.5 million over five years, supports highly innovative research and creative, new investigators who exhibit strong potential to make great advances on a critical biomedical or behavioral research problem.
Kohli’s lab will use the grant to study the enzymes that drive bacterial evolution, aiming to devise new methods to combat the emergence of drug-resistant bacteria.
The ability of pathogens to quickly build up resistance to the best available antibiotics leads to potentially devastating consequences to human health. Past responses to this concern have largely focused on modifying existing drugs, which can offer a brief reprieve, but eventually fosters more drug resistance. Kohli’s research seeks to change the paradigm of attacking drug resistance, by targeting the very pathways that allow the pathogen to mutate.
“Rather than focusing on drugs that kill bacteria, understanding and targeting bacteria’s ability to adapt could be an effective new approach to drug resistance,” said Kohli. “Given the clinical importance of the problem, I’m excited about the opportunities we can pursue with this award.”
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Penn Medicine is one of the world’s leading academic medical centers, dedicated to the related missions of medical education, biomedical research, excellence in patient care, and community service. The organization consists of the University of Pennsylvania Health System and Penn’s Raymond and Ruth Perelman School of Medicine, founded in 1765 as the nation’s first medical school.
The Perelman School of Medicine is consistently among the nation's top recipients of funding from the National Institutes of Health, with $550 million awarded in the 2022 fiscal year. Home to a proud history of “firsts” in medicine, Penn Medicine teams have pioneered discoveries and innovations that have shaped modern medicine, including recent breakthroughs such as CAR T cell therapy for cancer and the mRNA technology used in COVID-19 vaccines.
The University of Pennsylvania Health System’s patient care facilities stretch from the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania to the New Jersey shore. These include the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, Chester County Hospital, Lancaster General Health, Penn Medicine Princeton Health, and Pennsylvania Hospital—the nation’s first hospital, founded in 1751. Additional facilities and enterprises include Good Shepherd Penn Partners, Penn Medicine at Home, Lancaster Behavioral Health Hospital, and Princeton House Behavioral Health, among others.
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