ASCI / Emerging-Generation Awards, 2024

Viral S. Shah, MD, PhD, is a physician-scientist in pulmonary and critical care medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. He received his MD and PhD at the University of Iowa MSTP where he completed his training under the mentorship of Dr. Michael Welsh. Dr. Shah’s thesis work compared airway physiology between mice, pigs, and humans to better understand the pathogenesis of Cystic Fibrosis (CF), answering a 25-year-old question on why mice do not develop CF lung disease. His research work also determined how much CFTR, the protein defective in CF, is required to improve airway host defense defects.

Dr. Shah then attended the Massachusetts General Hospital Stanbury Physician Scientist Program for Internal Medicine training and continued Pulmonary/Critical Care Fellowship at the Harvard Combined program. He joined the laboratory of Dr. Jay Rajagopal where he is investigating the role of airway epithelia in health and disease. Specifically, he is studying two rare cell types discovered by Dr. Rajagopal, the ionocyte and the hillock. In order to study these cells in live tissue, Dr. Shah developed a new methodology using autofluorescence which identifies all seven of the different epithelial cell types without genetic modification or staining. Using this methodology, Dr. Shah uncovered new airway epithelial cell physiology. Specifically, he found that secretory cells uptake the environment into Secretory Cell Associated Antigen Passages (SAPs). This work was published in eLife and will be critical for his future investigations.

Dr. Shah was awarded the Leroy Matthews Physician Scientist Award by the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation to pursue his research work on understanding the role of the ionocyte in CF. He was also awarded a LungMap Pilot grant from NHLBI to identify and characterize the hillock in human airways.