Sougata Roy Awarded $2.5M NIH Grant After Receiving Rare ‘Unicorn Score’

The cell communication researcher received a perfect rating on his Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award application.

When University of Maryland Associate Professor Sougata Roy applied for the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) competitive Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA) last year, he hoped that reviewers would recognize the value of his ongoing work: using advanced microscopy to reveal the secrets of cell-to-cell communication in developing organisms.

Not only did Roy’s application receive the green light for $2.5 million for five years, but it also earned a perfect 10—a feat so rare that it is sometimes called a “unicorn score.”

“I couldn’t believe my eyes when I first saw that I received a perfect score from the NIH study section reviewers,” said Roy, a member of UMD’s Department of Cell Biology and Molecular Genetics (CBMG). “It was very surprising as well as exciting, as it is something that is often considered to happen once in a lifetime.”

The NIH has awarded 18 MIRA grants to UMD researchers, including 15 to faculty members in the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences. Roy was among the first researchers at UMD to receive this prestigious award in 2017, and he has now successfully secured funding for another five years.

CBMG Chair Kevin McIver said that Roy’s rare achievements are a testament to the importance and value of his research.

“To have a second NIH MIRA award funded is outstanding in and of itself, but for Sougata to receive a perfect 10 score just really emphasizes the deep respect of his scientific peers for the excellent research that he has been doing investigating how cells use long-range communication with each other to guide complex tissue development,” McIver said. “We couldn’t be happier for Sougata and his research team for this important accomplishment.”

MIRA grants are awarded to outstanding researchers who demonstrate an ability to “exert a sustained, powerful influence” on a field of study. Roy’s work aims to unravel the fundamental rules and mechanisms that govern how cells communicate with each other to carry out important functions.

“When we think about multicellular organisms, we need to understand that there are so many cells that need to coordinate with each other and orchestrate their functions in time and space,” Roy said.

He previously helped discover an intricate long-distance communication mechanism in fruit flies—a finding with far broader applications. Cells secrete signaling proteins that travel to other cells to instruct them on what to do and how and when to carry out those tasks. The ability of cells to “speak” to each other across distances is vital to the formation and maintenance of complex tissue patterns in animals, so any aberrations in those processes can affect an organism’s overall health. In humans, disruptions in cell communication have been linked to almost all major diseases, including cancer, autoimmune disease, and neurodegenerative diseases.

Throughout the course of his research, Roy discovered that the dispersal of signaling proteins might not be as random as currently believed by the scientific community.

“Traditionally, it is thought that these proteins were readily secreted by cells, and then the signals were randomly diffused through the extracellular space,” Roy said. “However, my previous and current research revealed that cells might be selecting when and how much of a signal should be released and which cells to send these signals to.”

In a study published in 2018, Roy’s team discovered that the molecules of an important signaling protein family were “surfing” along hair-like projections called cytonemes that protrude from cells. In this way, the cytonemes were serving as conduits, allowing signals to travel between cells.

“This mode of signal distribution is selective, target-specific and directional,” Roy said. “We call it asymmetric signaling because signals are selectively sent to some cells but not others. It is conceptually analogous to neurons, where signal delivery and reception are precisely restricted in time and space through the cell-cell contact sites called synapses.”

Roy’s subsequent research, including two papers published in the journal Nature Communications, characterized the essential roles of asymmetric signaling via cytonemes in many different contexts, including in shaping the fruit fly air sac—a human lung analog—and maintaining the muscle progenitor niche, a specialized microenvironment that houses undifferentiated cells and helps to regenerate muscles.

Roy’s current research continues to focus on cytonemes, particularly how this unique mode of contact-dependent communication is controlled at the molecular and cellular levels and how this process might help to create and maintain complex tissue structures in animals’ bodies.

Roy said he is grateful to the NIH for the opportunity to continue studying this important topic, and he looks forward to another five years of discovery.

“Cytoneme-mediated asymmetric signaling is a newly emerging field that is very exciting. However, how cells might send or receive signals and how this process might be controlled in space and time is a very old and fundamental question in developmental biology. Various theoretical models proposed to explain this mechanism are highly debated among scientists,” Roy said.

“I hope our work on cytonemes at the interface of cell and developmental biology will provide valuable insights into this problem and establish a conceptual and technical framework for its application in various other fields, including tissue engineering.”