ASCI / Young Physician-Scientist Awards, 2024
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
Yu (Ray) Zuo, MD, MS is an early-career physician-scientist developing a unique research niche by studying mechanisms and consequences of infection-associated autoimmunity.
Dr. Zou completed his clinical and research training at the University of Texas Southwestern. Drawn by the mentorship and the outstanding research environment at the University of Michigan, he joined the faculty here in 2019. Since then, he has authored more than 37 manuscripts, including first-author papers in journals such as Science Translational Medicine, JCI Insight, and other highly visible journals. He has also received four external research grants as principal investigator, including a NIAMS K08 award.
As an essential part of his research, Dr. Zuo has described a new class of autoantibodies—so-called anti-NET antibodies—in patients with antiphospholipid syndrome (APS). These antibodies are associated with severe clinical phenotypes. Mechanistically, they impair neutrophil extracellular trap (NET) degradation and activate complement cascades. This work resulted in two first-author manuscripts and enabled him to receive a highly competitive Investigator Award from the Rheumatology Research Foundation.
When the pandemic began in 2020, Dr. Zuo pivoted his research efforts to COVID-19, utilizing knowledge gained from studying APS. He was the first to demonstrate that the exaggerated release of NETs plays a central role in COVID-19 thromboinflammation (PMID 32329756; cited more than 1100 times to date). Later in 2020, he found that prothrombotic and proinflammatory autoantibodies are present in more than half of individuals hospitalized with COVID-19. Mechanistically, purified COVID-19 antibodies promote prothrombotic NET release ex vivo and accelerate thrombosis when transferred into mice (PMID 33139519, cited more than 400 times to date).
Importantly, Dr. Zuo's work in COVID-19 has led him to pursue a mechanistic understanding of infection-associated autoimmunity. This is a novel area of research that will provide new insights into the role of exogenous infection in breaking self-tolerance and leading to de novo pathogenic autoantibody production.