ASCI / Young Physician-Scientist Awards, 2022
The Young Physician-Scientist Awards (YPSA) recognize physician-scientists who are early in their first faculty appointment and have made notable achievements in their research.
About the awardee
José B. Sáenz, MD, PhD, trained as a physician-scientist at the Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine where he learned to frame basic science questions in a broader clinical context. While his initial research interests were varied, he ultimately became drawn to microbial pathogenesis and the ability of bacteria to manage and exploit interactions with their hosts. Dr. Sáenz has recently been intrigued by the ability of the bacterium Helicobacter pylori (Hp) to not only subvert its host but to establish a chronic infection and drive a reorganization of the human stomach that can lead to gastric cancer. His research program has focused on taking a multi-pronged approach to understanding the host-microbial interactions that drive pre-cancerous changes in the stomach. From the host perspective, Dr. Sáenz's lab has recently been investigating the response to double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) in gastric tumorigenesis, using newly developed in vivo and ex vivo models. From the pathogen perspective, his lab also studies how Hp transcriptionally adapts to alterations in the gastric landscape and how these microbial changes influence Hp pathogenesis and host immunity. Dr. Sáenz is currently an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Medicine and Molecular Cell Biology at the Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine and the Coordinator for the Digestive Diseases Research Core Conferences in the Division of Gastroenterology.