Keanu Davis Awarded NRSA F30 Fellowship

Tri-I student Keanu Davis was recently awarded an NIH National Research Service Award (NRSA) F30 Fellowship from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The NRSA F30 Fellowship supports the research and clinical training of promising predoctoral students in a combined MD/PhD or other dual doctoral degree training programs that aspire to become clinician-scientists. 

 

Keanu's F30 will support his research in the lab of Dr. Paul Bienasz at The Rockefeller University, where he is in his third year of the PhD phase of the program. His project is titled "A deep mutational scan of the HIV-1 capsid core." Keanu explains, "Our understanding of HIV-1’s post-entry lifecycle has undergone revision in recent years. Notably, a critical role for the conical ribonucleoprotein capsid core (‘core’) in orchestrating the post-entry events of the HIV-1 lifecycle is coming into focus. At the same time, the core’s critical role in the lifecycle has been corroborated by the staggering clinical success of the first-in-class capsid inhibitor, lenacapavir. These developments have re-exposed a long-held need for molecular insights into the exquisite biological activity of lentiviral cores and re-ignited the search for host-encoded dependencies therein. This project seeks to use exhaustive, scanning mutagenesis (‘deep-mutational scanning’) to identify genetic determinants of HIV-1 core assembly, infectivity and pharmacologic sensitivity, while leveraging a comparative approach to interrogate the host-encoded constraints of HIV-1 core post-entry activity, and infectivity."