Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, announced the winners of the 13th annual Regeneron Prize for Creative Innovation (the “Regeneron Prize”), which recognizes and rewards outstanding creativity and talent among early-career scientists in biomedical research.
Each year, top U.S. research universities nominate their most promising graduate students and postdoctoral fellows for this honor. These nominees are invited to develop and pitch their “dream projects” in biomedical science to a panel of Regeneron’s leading scientists, who evaluate the proposals for scientific merit, creativity and originality.
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This year’s winners are Alissandra L. Hillis, Ph.D., and Sreekar Mantena. Dr. Hillis is a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Mr. Mantena is an M.D.-Ph.D. candidate, enrolled in the joint Harvard Medical School-MIT program and nominated by Broad Institute. Each winner has been awarded $50,000, in addition to a $5,000 grant to their home institution to support its seminar series. Seven other finalists each received $5,000 awards.
“Regeneron has changed the practice of medicine by dreaming big and inventing game-changing technologies – from the soluble receptor technology that helps save the vision of millions, to the VelocImmune® humAb mouse that enabled treatments helping people suffering from allergic diseases and cancer,” said George D. Yancopoulos, M.D., Ph.D., Board co-Chair, President and Chief Scientific Officer of Regeneron, and principal inventor of Regeneron’s 12 FDA-approved medicines. “The Regeneron Prize encourages young scientists to dream big, challenge what’s possible, and recognize their potential to bring forward the breakthroughs of tomorrow. That’s exactly the kind of thinking the world needs right now, and we are proud to play a small part in the promising careers of these winners and finalists.”
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Dr. Hillis works in the lab of Professor Matthew Vander Heiden, Director of the Koch Institute at MIT, studying aspects of metabolism that are limiting for cell proliferation in different contexts in order to translate findings in cancer cell metabolism into novel cancer therapies. Dr. Hillis proposed an exciting approach to study endometriosis, a highly prevalent condition in women that causes significant medical consequences, including chronic pain.
Mr. Mantena is currently in the lab of Professor Soumya Raychaudhuri at Brigham and Women’s Hospital applying single-cell genomics approaches to study the adaptive immune system. For his proposal, Mr. Mantena was intrigued by the interesting phenomenon that cells in our thymus, which is responsible for important aspects of immune function, decrease competence with age. He wants to better understand this and proposed some exciting approaches to unravel this biological process and understand its implications for disease.
“The Regeneron Prize prompts early career scientists to solve a problem that is important to them. We look for originality and creativity on the one hand, and practicality on the other. In particular, we’re trying to find young scientists who ask scientifically and medically important questions, alongside the ability to design a research plan capable of answering those questions,” said David J. Glass, M.D., Vice President of Research, and Chair of the Postdoctoral Program at Regeneron.
