Ivan Marazzi, PhD
Ivan Marazzi, PhD, Assistant Professor of Microbiology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, received $2.5 million in funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) to further the understanding of the underlying causes of neurodegenerative disorders such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease), and Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases.
The Initiative was established by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and pediatrician Priscilla Chan, his wife. The award is part of a $64 million commitment to fund early-career investigators and collaborative science teams to launch the CZI Neurodegeneration Challenge Network, which aims to bring together basic scientists from neuroscience, cell biology, biochemistry, immunology, and genomics.
Cori Bargmann, PhD, Head of Science for CZI, says: “We’re excited to welcome the first group of CZI Neurodegeneration Challenge Network grantees. Together, their work will increase our knowledge of the basic biology of these diseases—and we need that knowledge to develop better treatments.”
Dr. Marazzi studies epigenetic- and chromatin-mediated mechanisms—the heritable alterations that cause genes to turn on or off—and the cellular response to pathogens or cellular differentiation. The major focus of his research is the unique and shared molecular pathways underlying inflammatory, infectious, and neurodegenerative diseases to uncover the relationship between seemingly unrelated diseases to find effective therapeutic interventions.
Earlier work from Dr. Marazzi provided a new paradigm for how mutations can confer both susceptibility to infection and predisposition to neurodegeneration. He was the senior investigator of two groundbreaking studies published in Nature Immunology and Cell that identified a link between innate immune dysfunctions and congenital defects in two proteins controlling RNA metabolism—the RNA exosome and senataxin.
“These studies revealed how we can discover genes linked to disease—in this case, neurodegeneration—by looking at the natural symbiosis between a host and a pathogen,” says Dr. Marazzi. “Our goal is to use this discovery as a foundation to elucidate the relationship between innate immune defects and neurodegeneration to find effective therapeutic interventions.”