Dr. Jordan Orange Receives Prestigious MERIT Award from NIH NIAID
Department of Pediatrics chair Jordan Orange, MD, PhD was recently awarded a MERIT (Method To Extend Research in Time) Award from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. This prestigious (R37) grant is designed to provide stable, long-term funding support to experienced investigators with stellar records of research accomplishment.
Unlike most NIH awards, investigators may not apply for a MERIT award, but are identified by NIH staff or members of the National Advisory Council during their review of competing research grant applications. MERIT awards can be awarded only once in a career.
Dr. Orange’s award will support his research efforts to understand how natural killer (NK) immune cells kill tumor cells and help develop NK cell therapies to better treat cancer. NK cells target infected and cancerous cells by secreting a special payload called “lytic granules” onto their surface. Dr. Orange is studying ways to convert NK cells from “one cell at a time,” directional killers into those that can eradicate many diseased cells at the same time, by releasing their granules in multiple directions. His lab is also developing new high-resolution systems to observe and test NK cell killing in complex 3-dimensional tumor environments.
“This is a really exciting moment for my research program,” says Dr. Orange, who joined the Department of Pediatrics as chair in 2018. “I decided to come to Columbia because it has such an extraordinary environment, and I wanted to focus on supporting faculty and learners and help them to thrive within this environment. I accepted that any advancement of my own research would at least take a back seat, which I felt would have been a wonderful and fulfilling tradeoff. I wasn’t anticipating that the environment would be so profoundly rich that it would be almost impossible to not think about the research questions that have defined my academic identity, despite the responsibilities of heading a department. That I would then receive an NIAID MERIT award was simply inconceivable. I suppose at Columbia, though, the inconceivable is conceived.”
Dr. Orange is one of nine Columbia investigators that presently hold NIH MERIT awards. Department of Pediatrics chief of pediatric critical care and hospital medicine Hulya Bayir, MD is also a MERIT award recipient; she received her award in 2021 from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke to support her research into ways to lessen the long-term damaging effects of traumatic brain injury in children, and to design novel drug therapies that could both save essential brain cells from destruction and be effective in other neurological diseases. (Read more about Dr. Bayir’s research here.)
