Zeinab Jahed Receives $1.9M NIH MIRA Grant to Study How Cells Sense and Repair Physical Damage

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Zeinab Jahed, professor in the Aiiso Yufeng Li Family Department of Chemical and Nano Engineering at the University of California San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering, has received a $1.9M National Institutes of Health (NIH) Maximizing Investigators Research Award (MIRA) from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS). 

The award will support Jahed’s work to develop new technologies that could provide a detailed look at how individual cells respond when their protective barriers are physically damaged. The research could offer new insights into fundamental cellular processes involved in aging, cancer and other diseases.

Every cell in the body is surrounded by a thin barrier (cell membrane) that helps protect it from its surroundings. Inside the cell, a second barrier (nuclear membrane) surrounds the nucleus and protects its genetic material. Both membranes are essential for keeping cells healthy, but they can become physically damaged as cells move, grow, divide and experience mechanical stress. 

“Cells have remarkable mechanisms for rapidly repairing this damage, yet we still do not fully understand how these repair processes work or why they sometimes fail,” Jahed said. “We want to understand what makes a cell resilient to physical damage.”

With support from the NIH MIRA, Jahed and her team will develop nanoscale technologies that can precisely induce damage in both the cell and nuclear membranes of individual living cells and allow researchers to watch the repair process as it happens. 

These tools will enable the team to follow, in real time, how a cell detects injury; brings repair machinery to the damaged area; and rebuilds its protective membranes. The team will also investigate why some cells repair themselves within seconds or minutes while others take much longer or fail to recover, and how repeated membrane damage can alter cell behavior over time. The project will combine nanotechnology, live-cell imaging and quantitative analysis to better understand the fundamental processes that allow cells to withstand and recover from physical damage. 

“We ultimately want to understand the rules that determine whether a damaged cell recovers, adapts or undergoes more lasting changes,” Jahed said. “Being able to watch these processes one cell at a time gives us an opportunity to connect a very rapid physical event to consequences that may unfold over much longer periods.”

These questions have broad relevance because disruption of the cell and nuclear membranes occurs in many biological settings and has increasingly been linked to aging and diseases such as cancer, where cells can experience abnormal mechanical stresses and repeated damage to the structures that protect them and their genomes.

The MIRA program provides investigators with long-term, flexible support for a broader program of research rather than funding a single narrowly defined project. The funding over five years will give Jahed's lab the flexibility to develop new technologies while also pursuing unexpected biological findings that emerge from studying membrane damage and repair at the single-cell level.