Graduate student Devon Jeltema of the Yan Lab has won the 2023 William F. and Grace H. Kirkpatrick Award for her grant application related to the discovery of a previously unrecognized regulator of type I interferon (IFN-I), a key immune molecule.

The award is presented annually to a UT Southwestern Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences student who submits the most scientifically meritorious National Institutes of Health (NIH) fellowship or equivalent grant application during the prior academic year as judged by the Graduate School Awards Committee. The grant for Ms. Jeltema’s research provides $30,000 to the lab of Nan Yan, Ph.D., Professor of Immunology and Microbiology, to kick-start the proposed research.

“I’m honored to have won. It feels incredible to have my project recognized in this way,” said Ms. Jeltema, a fifth year Ph.D. candidate and native of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Her project, called “Role of PARP7 in Negative Feedback Regulation of Type I Interferon Signaling,” identifies a key regulator of a pathway that controls the immune system in infections, cancer, and autoimmune diseases.

Work in the Yan lab by Ms. Jeltema showed that mice lacking PARP7 developed autoimmune disease that damaged their lungs and other tissues.

When Ms. Jeltema arrived at UTSW in 2019, she spent time in the Yan Lab during one of her lab rotations. She focused on testing a short list of genes to see if any regulated the activity of IFN-I, a type of protein known as a cytokine that stimulates the immune system to fight viral infections and malignant cells, with overactivity linked to autoimmune diseases. Using manipulations that caused cells to overproduce IFN-I cytokine, Ms. Jeltema showed that the enzyme PARP7 is a powerful negative regulator of IFN-I production – the more that PARP7 protein cells synthesize, the less they in turn can produce of the IFN-I cytokine.

After Ms. Jeltema decided to stay in the Yan Lab, subsequent work showed that mice genetically altered to lack PARP7 and mice with a mutation in PARP7 that renders the enzyme inactive developed autoimmune disease that damaged their lungs and other tissues.

Ms. Jeltema is already partially supported by UTSW’s Immunology T32 Training Program, an NIH-funded fellowship that pays a stipend, travel, and training-related expenses for a limited number of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. As part of this program, trainees are encouraged to apply for other grants.

Ms. Jeltema works in the lab of Nan Yan, Ph.D., (right) Professor of Immunology and Microbiology, studying an immune system molecule called PARP7 that has connections to infection, cancer, and autoimmune diseases.

In 2021, Ms. Jeltema and her colleagues in the Yan Lab collaborated with a graduate student in the Department of Biochemistry to investigate the mechanism behind how PARP7 regulates IFN-I signaling and which proteins work with this enzyme, writing an application for a $1,000 grant from the Graduate School that was ultimately funded. She used material from this application to write a new grant for an F31 Award, an NIH-funded fellowship that supports research led by pre-doctoral students.

Dr. Yan said Ms. Jeltema wrote the entirety of the grant application except for his mentor section. “It was a solid submission,” he said, “but in the end, it wasn’t funded.”

That fueled her desire to keep trying, however, so Ms. Jeltema applied for the Kirkpatrick Award, which she won. Then she submitted another application based on this work to the Lupus Research Alliance, which awarded her a three-year grant to support this line of study.

“I have never met a more creative person than Devon,” Dr. Yan said. “With her curiosity and creativity, I think she will be a successful principal investigator someday.”