Casim Sarkar awarded grant to pave the way for better therapeutics

May 7, 2026 — Professor Casim Sarkar of the Department of Biomedical Engineering has been awarded a prestigious Maximizing Investigators' Research Award (MIRA; R35 grant) from the National Institutes of Health. Funds from the five-year award will support efforts to better understand clinically vital proteins and produce new drug candidates against them. 

Both healthy and diseased cells engage with proteins in their environment that impact health, but the molecular basis of many of these interactions are poorly understood. Other proteins on the surface of cells are important drug targets, yet inherently challenging to work with outside of a cell and target selectively.

Support from the new grant will enable Sarkar to help address these gaps by developing new computational and experimental tools. The tools will help researchers identify and modify the specific determinants that govern protein-protein interactions, and ultimately help design more effective molecular and cellular therapeutics for treating a wide range of diseases.

Efforts will build on earlier work that resulted in an app for predicting the strength, speed, and selectivity of multivalent interactions, which involve molecules that have multiple binding sites and can be used to develop highly selective medicines for diseases like cancer. The app for researchers, called MVsim, is freely available on GitHub.