BroadIgnite is a funding opportunity that connects emerging philanthropists with early-career scientists to catalyze potentially transformative ideas. Eligible Broadies can apply anytime, and awards are made on a rolling basis as funds become available. See the BroadIgnite RFA to learn more about the eligibility requirements and application process.
Congrats to the winners of the 2024 BroadIgnite Awards! This innovative program connects early-career philanthropists with early-career scientists to build connections and fund science that may be too risky to receive funding from other sources. Award recipients receive $40,000 in direct-cost research funding. But BroadIgnite is not only a funding mechanism: Recipients also receive professional development training in leadership, budget management, and science communication.
There are seven outstanding awardees:
Andrew Russell
Throughout our lives, the nonreproductive or somatic cells in our bodies are constantly undergoing DNA mutations—changes that can sometimes lead to an increased risk of cancer and other diseases. Andrew’s BroadIgnite project seeks to better understand the genetic landscape of somatic mutations; how they are acquired by cells and tissues as we age; and how they contribute to human disease. For this, he will build novel sequencing tools and enhance a technology he has already pioneered, called Slide-tags, that allows researchers to deeply profile individual cells while also retaining their spatial locations as well as information on their cellular environment. (This information is often lost in traditional sequencing techniques.)
Hannah Brown
Fungal pathogens, such as Candida albicans, cause some of the most prevalent and deadliest infections in patient populations. Yet there are only a few effective antifungal therapeutics. Hannah is working to change this. With her BroadIgnite award, she will profile fungal extracellular vesicles—membrane-bound particles secreted by fungi that help infect the host—and investigate how the host immune system responds to them. This work can yield crucial insights into the biology of fungal pathogens, pointing researchers toward new antifungal strategies.
Jennifer Lo
As a dermatologist at Harvard Medical School, Jennifer has seen how immunotherapies, such as immune checkpoint inhibitors, can treat melanoma—a type of aggressive skin cancer—effectively in some patients but not others. Her BroadIgnite project seeks to understand this variability in patient response using recently developed spatial sequencing approaches in mouse models and patient samples. She aims to uncover mechanisms underlying resistance to checkpoint inhibitors in melanoma; identify ways to promote patient response to treatments; and test novel immunotherapy strategies.
Shai Zilberzwige-Tal
This year, the first-ever CRISPR-based gene therapy was approved for use in sickle cell disease patients. While this is a powerful example of how gene therapies are transforming treatments, the field still faces a major challenge: creating safe delivery vehicles that can send gene therapies to the right cells in the right organs. One promising option is deactivated viruses. Shai will use her BroadIgnite funding to leverage machine-learning approaches and create a pipeline for engineering new and robust viral delivery vehicles that can be easily targeted to specific cell types—improving gene therapy efficacy and reducing side effects.
Shiwei Wang
All cells in the brain are covered in carbohydrates, such as heparan sulfate (HS), which plays a critical role in forming neuronal connections as well as in neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimer’s disease. However, it has long been challenging to study this important carbohydrate without removing it from its biological context. As a BroadIgnite awardee, Shiwei will tackle this by building a set of novel optical sequencing tools that can visualize and profile individual HS molecules in intact biological samples—work that can advance our understanding of HS and its neurobiological functions.
Soumya Kannan
The human microbiome—the community of microorganisms (such as bacteria, fungi, and viruses) that live in and on the human body—impacts a variety of biological processes in both health and disease. But the molecular mechanisms driving this microbiome–host crosstalk remain poorly understood. For her BroadIgnite project, Soumya plans to develop high-throughput strategies to identify interactions between the microbiome proteins found throughout the human body, including the gut, mouth, skin, and more, and human proteins as well as characterize their biological functions—research that can eventually decode microbiome-associated disease pathways.
Vijay Ganesh
Despite major advances in genome sequencing technologies over the past few decades, the majority of individuals with a suspected genetic disease still lack a confirmed diagnosis. This unmet need is especially prevalent for neurogenetic disorders. As a neurologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Vijay will tackle this challenge with his BroadIgnite project. Specifically, he will partner with the Broad Proteomics Platform, deploying machine-learning approaches to develop an assay that detects protein expression outliers from individuals with unsolved rare genetic diseases. Vijay’s goal is to develop a scalable method from clinically-accessible tissues that can both augment novel gene discovery and resolve variant-to-function associations, ultimately shortening the diagnostic odyssey for patients and potentially informing tailored genetic therapies.
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