Dr. Randy Longman, director of the Jill Roberts Center for Inflammatory Bowel Disease and Associate Professor of Medicine in the division of Gastroenterology & Hepatology, recently received the NIH Director’s Transformative Research Award to continue his work developing the tools needed to understand how the gut microbiome drives metabolic pathways. The award will provide about $5.6 million over five years to Dr. Longman and his co-principal investigators, Dr. Chun-Jun Guo, Assistant Professor in the Jill Roberts Center for IBD, also in the division of Gastroenterology & Hepatology, and Dr. Aaron Wright, the Schofield Endowed Chair in Biomedical Science and professor at Baylor University.
“The NIH Director’s Transformative Research Award identifies areas in science where there is an unmet need and an opportunity through collaborative science to make transformative breakthroughs,” Dr. Longman said. “It’s an exciting opportunity for three scientists with three distinct scientific programs to come together to accelerate our understanding of the functional impact of gut microbes on human health.”
Established in 2009, the award funds innovative but inherently risky research endeavors that have the potential to overturn existing scientific paradigms or create new ones. Part of the High-Risk High Reward Research Program, it helps fund large-scale, unconventional projects that may create new research tools or technologies or develop radically different diagnostic or therapeutic approaches.
“Scientists have studied the microbiome for over a decade with advanced sequencing technologies, and we are very good identifying the microbes that make up the microbiome, genetically sequencing them, and recognizing the metabolites they produce.” Dr. Longman said. “Now, it’s really about connecting the dots between what the microbes are doing and how it affects human health.”
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