Dr Peter Lwigale, a Ugandan Rice University researcher has won a United States Federal Grant worth $1.5 million to study how a recently identified protein in the cornea aids development, homeostasis and wound healing in the eye.
Lwigale an associate professor of biochemistry and cell biology, won the four-year National Institutes of Health R01 grant to study nephronectin (Npnt), a protein recently identified by his lab to be abundantly expressed in the eye’s extracellular matrix. The grant will be administered through the National Eye Institute.
The Lwigale Laboratory at Rice University is studying whether Npnt and its binding partners play key roles during formation, maintenance and repair of the cornea.
“More than 90% of the cornea is made from these embryonic stem cells,” Dr Lwigale says. “They give rise to two distinct cell types that populate the inner layer, called the corneal endothelium, and the collagenous middle layer, called the stroma.
“The future that we are going toward is to look at individualized medicine where we can generate stem cells from the patient,” he says. “If we can then reprogram those stem cells into certain tissues, we want to know how to use those cells to fix something like the cornea.”
Background
Diageo to Exit East African Breweries as Asahi Takes ControlBorn in Jinja, Uganda, Dr. Peter Lwigale has built a flourishing career in science.
Having done his B.S in Biology and Minor in Chemistry at the University of Northern Iowa, US in 1994, three years later, he completed his M.S. in Cell and Developmental Biology, after working on a NASA funded project to study the effects of microgravity on cardiac development. Four years later, he earned his Ph.D. in Cell and Developmental Biology at Kansas State University
He then did his postdoctoral training at Caltech and at the Lwigale Laboratory at Rice University. He is the principal investigator in finding how the cornea forms during development and how genes are involved in this process.
To young minds out there, Dr Lwigale, wants them to know the “extraordinary feeling of discovery.”
