Sanjana Dayal, PhD, associate professor in Hematology, Oncology, and Blood and Marrow Transplantation, received a renewal on a Veterans Affairs (VA) Merit Award, which she first received in July 2020. With this second round of funding, the Dayal Lab is awarded $300,000 per year for four years through the Clinical Science Research and Development (CSRD) mechanism within the VA Office of Research & Development.

The funds will continue to be used to study thrombotic susceptibility in middle-aged veterans with or without prediabetes. Because of COVID-19 related recruitment restrictions, the researcher team was unable to start the project with human subjects, so the initial work focused on aging studies in mouse models. As restrictions eased, they met their recruitment goal and completed studies with human participants.

The funding cycle that made this research possible ended in June 2024, but Dayal’s promising data secured the renewal of the award until 2028. One basic requirement for renewal is demonstrating good research progress, which includes addressing all the proposed specific aims and producing publications as a direct outcome of the funded research. A second critical requirement for renewal is to generate adequate pilot data to demonstrate that the renewal proposal has novelty, is significant, and the subsequent proposed work is not just incremental or an extension of previous work. The team’s proposal was well received by their study section and met both requirements.

“We made the novel observation that prediabetes in young or middle-aged people causes increased susceptibility to platelet activation and arterial thrombosis,” Dayal said. “We also found that this phenomenon was modulated by mitochondrial oxidants,” which are oxidizing agents within the mitochondria that can damage cells if produced in excess.

The new round of funding will allow the Dayal Lab to investigate promising trends from the initial study by determining mechanisms of increased mitochondrial oxidant generation (a precursor to thrombosis) and the signaling mechanism through which mitochondrial oxidants cause platelet activation during prediabetes and aging.

Dayal said she is grateful for the cross-departmental collaboration that contributes to the continual success of their work: “We appreciate the help from our collaborative team, especially Dr. Diana Jalal, who helped with recruitment and provided clinical insight into the project; Dr. Doug Spitz, who provided critical reagent; and Dr. Dale Abel, who provided his expertise in diabetes,” Dayal said.