Benos Lab Receives U01 Research Grant from NIH

Takis Benos, Professor and Vice Chair at the Department of Computational and Systems  Biology, and his collaborators were awarded a U01 research grant to study changes occurring in healthy lungs as they age.  The grant, totaling $2.5 million, is part of a larger consortium of five awarded grants.  Groups from Yale, Columbia, Cornell and Albert Einstein are the other four recipients.  The Pitt group, led by Dr. Mauricio Rojas, also includes Drs Ana Mora, Robert Lafyatis and Toren Finkel.

“Many chronic diseases are the result of cells’ malfunctioning as we age”, says Takis Benos.  “It will be tremendously useful to map these age-associated changes in the lung, not only for establishing a baseline, but also to understand the details of important molecular processes.”  The group will collect and analyze single cell RNA-seq data from lungs of healthy individuals and will also study the mechanisms of the progression of specific age-related pathways.