Masako Suzuki, Ph.D., D.V.M., has received a four-year, $1.6 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to investigate a novel mechanism that may result in human disease. Her research focuses on whether perturbations that occur prenatally can lead to cellular abnormalities in adulthood. Using mouse models, she will study the impact of prenatal vitamin A (retinoic acid) deficiency on developing airway smooth muscle cells in the lung and, ultimately, on later respiratory disease.

More specifically, Dr. Suzuki will investigate whether transcriptional dysregulation resulting from vitamin A deficiency leads to cellular reprogramming and cell fate changes in those developing airway cells. Using genome-wide assays, she and her colleagues will map where in the mouse genome those transcriptional events occur and will use this information to interpret the results of human genome-wide association studies.

Her research should shed light on the gene-environment interactions involved in common human diseases. Dr. Suzuki is a research assistant professor of genetics at Einstein. (1 R01 HL145302-01A1)