Ariel Polizio, PhD, was chosen as one of a select group of participants in this year’s Butler-Williams Scholars Program. The program, run by the National Institutes of Health National Institute on Aging (NIH-NIA), is a four-day intensive designed to help postdocs and early career faculty successfully apply for funding from the NIA. Acceptance to this program is highly competitive, and Polizio, who joined UVA from Argentina’s premiere CONICET agency, will benefit from grantsmanship panels, workshops, and mock sessions run by the NIA’s program officers and leaders in the aging field. “I want to specialize in aging research, so this will be a big jump for my career,” Polizio explains.
Polizio, mentored by CVRC resident member Ken Walsh, PhD, is an expert in age-related clonal cell hematopoiesis. As we age, our cells acquire a variety of mutations. These mutations can propagate over time, with mutated cells eventually able to outnumber the nonmutated. These mutations were previously considered harmless, but Dr. Polizio and Dr. Walsh have shown that clonal cell hematopoiesis has health consequences, particularly by promoting “inflammaging,” long-term, low-level inflammation that prematurely ages tissues and organs. Polizio has shown that in cases of renal cell carcinoma, the most common form of kidney cancer, inflammaging and clonal cell hematopoiesis can exacerbate the side effects of the most common chemotherapy treatments. In fact, these therapies may actually accelerate the mutation accumulation process. The research that won Polizio entrance to the Butler-Williams Scholars Program proposes to explore these effects and identify potential treatments.
“It’s an honor for me to meet with the program officers, directors, and scientific colleagues from around the nation,” says Polizio.