Whitehead Fellow Aditya Raguram receives a National Institutes of Health Early Independence Award

Whitehead Fellow Aditya Raguram has received a 2024 NIH Director’s Early Independence Award. The prestigious funding award will support his work developing cell-derived bioparticles into safe and efficient vehicles for delivering therapeutic proteins into cells.

Toward the ultimate goal of using bioparticles loaded with therapeutic proteins or RNAs to treat specific diseases, Raguram’s project seeks to understand factors that influence bioparticle formation, and then to develop strategies for highly efficient bioparticle production.

A facet of the National Institute of Health’s High-Risk, High-Reward Research program, the Early Independence Award enables exceptional junior scientists to move immediately into independent research positions. The Award is both a significant recognition of and a substantial boost to a young investigator’s research program: Each receives $250,000 a year for five years to advance their scientific work. Nationally, just 12 investigators received an Early Independence Award in 2024.

“I am honored to receive an Early Independence Award and to join the ranks of other Early Independence investigators,” Raguram says. “This award will dramatically expand our lab’s capabilities and enable us to pursue innovative approaches to advance the scope of bioparticle-based protein delivery.”

Raguram, who launched his Whitehead Institute lab in 2023, holds a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and physics and a PhD in chemical biology, both from Harvard University. During his doctoral research with David R. Liu at the Broad Institute, he developed several technologies for precision genome editing and protein delivery.

That work led, in part, to Raguram’s recent inclusion in the MIT Technology Review’s 2024 Innovator Under 35 listing — which recognized him for developing groundbreaking tools to make CRISPR genetic engineering more practical for treating a wide range of genetic disorders.