Baccile Awarded $1.8 Million Grant for Pioneering Research on Five-Carbon Metabolism

April 4, 2025 by Jennifer Brown

Assistant Professor Joshua Baccile has been awarded a Maximizing Investigators’ Research (MIRA) award from the NIH. The MIRA grant, unlike many other grants, is awarded to support a researcher’s collective vision for their lab. Baccile’s lab is focused on investigating the role of five-carbon metabolism in the human body, which could impact long-term health.

“Our cells make cholesterol through a metabolic pathway called the isoprenoid pathway and many of the most largely prescribed drugs target this pathway. Statins are the most common example of these,” said Baccile.

Statins, commonly prescribed for high cholesterol, generally work by reducing the number of five-carbon precursors in the isoprenoid pathway. However, the underlying function of these five-carbon precursors is not well understood.

Baccile’s research examines what else these molecules do in the body beyond contributing to high levels of cholesterol. His team has made derivatives of two precursor molecules that can be introduced into cells. This allows his team to test for a variety of effects.

“We want to figure out what other molecules they make. We want to be able to control where they go, how many of them go there, and we want to be able to track them,” said Baccile. “Our goal is to expand the scope of what’s known about the isoprenoid pathway.”

Baccile’s lab was the first to develop functional derivatives of these 5-carbon precursors that can be used in experimentation. This work has the potential to discover the underlying purpose of a poorly understood metabolic pathway in the human body, which could impact several areas of human health.

Because of its foundational nature, Baccile’s research has generated international interest and opportunities for collaboration with other teams investigating the complexities of the human body.

“When we do science, we’re trying to discover unknowns which, in our case, are about human cellular physiology,” said Baccile. “This research is important because it will help us understand a really important pathway in basic human biology. These molecules are implicated in cardiac diseases, neurodegenerative diseases, and cancer. If we know more about them and how they work, we can create better treatments and therapies that target some of the most common issues in human health today.”

Baccile also plans to leverage his MIRA grant to continue, and potentially expand, his existing community college research fellowship program. This program provides summer research opportunities for area community college students interested in transferring into a four-year program.

“A critical function of academic research labs is the training of students and future scientists who will continue to ask these questions and make new discoveries,” said Baccile. He describes his graduate students as instrumental to the early research and publications that build into grants like the MIRA.

The NIH MIRA grant will provide $1.8 million to the Baccile lab over the course of five years.