DLRG member honored with prestigious two-year postdoctoral fellowship from the AHA
Congratulations to Keehum Kim who was awarded an American Heart Association (AHA) Postdoctoral Fellowship for his research proposal entitled “A combinatory multi-technique system to advance cardiac GPCR pharmacology.” Keehun becomes the first member of the DLRG to receive this prestigious fellowship. Keehun’s AHA project seeks to understand an extraordinary class of proteins called G protein coupled receptors (GPCRs). The superfamily of GPCRs play a key role in regulating cardiac function. Currently, the vast majority of pharmaceutical agents that treat cardiovascular diseases target cardiac GPCRs. However, technical limitations prevent high-throughput and quantitative study of GPCR function directly at the level of receptor activity. Thus, biochemical and biophysical understanding of how missense variations in GPCRs affect drug efficacy remains lacking. The goal of Keehun’s project is to integrate multiple protein engineering and synthesis technologies to overcome such limitations and carry out an in-depth investigation into how missense variations in GPCRs alter drug-response at the initial stage of the signaling cascade. The AHA Postdoctoral Fellowship provides two years of funding that will be instrumental in helping Keehun pursue these exciting objectives.
For more information about the AHA Postdoctoral Fellowship program, please go here:
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