UMass professor receives $4.2M grant to study paternal link to disease

Courtesy of UMass Medical School Dr. Oliver Rando will study the link between paternal diet the propensity for inherited diseases, like diabetes and heart disease, thanks to a $4.2 million Pioneer Award from the National Institutes of Health.

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By Emily Micucci

Dr. Oliver Rando, a professor of biochemistry and molecular pharmacology at UMass Medical School, has received one of 10 Pioneer Awards granted to researchers by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the medical school announced.

Using the $4.2 million grant, Rando will study how a father’s diet can influence the metabolism of his children in order to better understand how it may influence the propensity toward inherited diseases, UMMS said. Rando’s lab and several others have linked paternal diet to diseases like diabetes in the next generation.

“Understanding how this works will be incredibly important for understanding complex heritable diseases, such as diabetes and heart disease,” Rando said in a story published by the UMMS Office of Communications.

Rando added that the five-year grant “is a rare luxury in today’s funding climate, although it must be said that this is how all basic research should be done … I am exceptionally grateful for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

In his proposal to the NIH, Rando said that recent results in the field of epigenetics, which studies the heritable changes that are not caused by changes in DNA sequence, have resurrected the once-discredited possibility that the environment of parents could have an effect on the physical characteristics of their offspring.

In his work with mice, Rando said he’s been able to link paternal low-protein diet to cholesterol metabolism in offspring. He said he will build on those results using the Pioneer Award.

“I propose a combination of genetic, epigenetic, cell biology and development biology studies to investigate the … basis for generation of (RNA) in response to diet, and to determine the functional consequences … for the next generation,” Rando wrote in his proposal.

Rando’s Pioneer Award was issued under the NIH’s High-Risk Reward initiative, which in previous years has allowed awardees to establish new scientific paradigms and, in some cases, revolutionize entire fields of biology, UMMS said.

“Dr. Rando’s work is truly pioneering. It has broken down all sorts of preconceived notions about how inheritance works,” Dr. Terence Flotte, dean and chief research officer for UMMS, said in the story.

In addition to the 10 Pioneer Awards issued this year, NIH issued 50 New Innovator awards, eight Transformative Research awards and 17 Early Independence Awards under the High-Risk Reward initiative, for a total of $141 million in funding.