Mohsan Saeed, PhD, assistant professor of biochemistry & cell biology, has received the 2023 Smith Family Foundation Odyssey Award, the first recipient from BU so honored.

Created by the Richard and Susan Smith Family Foundation in 2017 to fuel creativity and innovation in junior investigators in the basic sciences, the Odyssey Award supports the pursuit of high-impact ideas to generate breakthroughs and drive new directions in biomedical research by funding high-risk, high-reward pilot projects solicited from the brightest junior faculty in the region.

As part of the award, Saeed will receive $400,000 to study how mosquito-borne viruses (arboviruses) overcome the immune system of mosquitoes and establish persistent infection that is then transmitted to humans. He will collaborate on this project with Joseph Zaia, PhD, professor
of biochemistry & cell biology, and Fabiana Feitosa-Suntheimer, PhD, a senior research scientist at the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories (NEIDL).

Mosquito-borne arboviruses claim over one million human lives each year and are considered a global health priority due to their frequent resurgence of activity and unprecedented geographical expansion in recent decades. In the absence of vaccines and targeted treatments, designing strategies to control arboviruses at the mosquito level is imperative.

According to Saeed, his project is based on the premise that an in-depth understanding of mechanisms by which arboviruses establish lifelong infection in mosquitoes can inspire the design of powerful approaches to reduce viral transmission to humans. He will use an advanced technique, which he recently developed, to investigate the molecular details of how arboviruses disarm mosquitoes’ antiviral defense systems and establish persistent infection.

“These studies will open up new lines of investigation into viral persistence and mosquito biology and facilitate the design of transgenic mosquitoes unable to harbor and transmit infections. It will also accelerate a discovery pipeline that can then be extended to other insect-borne pathogens such as plasmodium and borrelia,” says Saeed, who joined BU in 2019 and also is an investigator at the NEIDL, where his lab explores the role of viral and host proteases in disease mechanisms of positive-strand RNA viruses.

When COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic in early 2021, Saeed’s lab pivoted to SARS-CoV-2 research and has since made contributions to the molecular understanding of how SARS-CoV-2 establishes infection in various tissues and interacts with the human innate and adaptive immune systems.