Sanjana Dayal, PhD, associate professor in Hematology, Oncology, and Blood and Marrow Transplantation (HOBMT), received a four-year $2.34M R01 grant from the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. Dayal plans to use this funding to expand her research in the field of aging-associated thrombosis. She will examine the protective mechanisms via which caloric restriction (CR) intervention alters the thrombotic susceptibility during aging.

Though CR is known to lower the burden of some cardiovascular outcomes, it has never been tested in the setting of age-associated thrombosis. This project is driven by Dayal’s novel pilot data showing protective effects of CR on platelets in the setting of aging and diabetes. She will study changes in mitochondrial structure and metabolic pathways due to age and diabetes and its prevention with CR. This work will be accomplished in collaboration with University of Iowa’s Professor of Radiation Oncology Douglas Spitz, PhD; Professor of Neuroscience and Pharmacology Kamal Rahmouni, PhD; and UCLA Health’s Chair and Professor of Medicine E. Dale Abel, MD, PhD.

This is Dayal’s third R01 and her second since she was promoted to tenured associate professor in 2021. Her lab also studies mechanisms of coagulopathy in COVID-19 in collaboration with Steven Lentz, MD, PhD, professor in HOBMT, as a Co-Principal Investigator. Dayal and Lentz received this funding in 2022 from the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease.

Dayal is also funded through a Iowa City VA Health Care System Merit Award to study prediabetes-associated prothrombotic state in middle-aged Veterans, working with Associate Professor in Nephrology Diana Jalal, MD, and Abel. She has also recently collaborated with George Weiner, MD, professor in HOBMT, and they have been awarded pilot funding from the HOBMT division for their project, Novel Genetic Signatures of Venous Thrombosis in Pancreatic and Colon Cancer. These collaborations allow Dayal to expand her expertise in different disease conditions.

Dayal is grateful for the support she has received from a variety of sources, attributing her success in part to her mentors, including Lentz, with whom she started her journey at Iowa as a postdoctoral associate in his lab. She also appreciates all the hard work from her lab members that has allowed them to secure this diversity of funding.