MD/PhD Student Receives Fellowship from National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute

Sukriti Bagchi, an MD/PhD student at the University of Arizona College of Medicine – Phoenix, has received a fellowship from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.

Bagchi’s research training fellowship will focus on the regulation of SGK1-mediated pathological cardiac hypertrophy by non-canonical endoplasmic reticulum-associated degradation (ERAD).

“The fellowship will allow me to research a unique and important cellular process discovered by previous members of the lab, who have shown that this process is likely disrupted in progressive heart failure,” Bagchi said.

Pathological cardiac hypertrophy refers to imbalanced growth that leads to disease. The heart’s internal cellular and molecular network is crucial to maintaining vitality. Interrupting it has a plethora of consequences that have only been recently discovered.

“I’m continually inspired by new technologies that can be applied to uncover how we might restore cellular health at the fundamental level and, by extension, how we might restore heart health,” Bagchi said.

The grant supports individual graduate training on the scientific integrity of the proposal, as well as the feasibility of completing her goals from that training under good mentorship.

“I anticipate that my research will demonstrate the importance of this signaling molecule in pathological cardiac hypertrophy and hope it can uncover how this process occurs,” Bagchi said. “Our discoveries will result in new insights about the underlying nature of heart disease that we have not considered in the past.”

Bagchi always had an interest in science, earning her undergraduate degree in biology and chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

In 2015, Bagchi qualified for the Translational Genomics Research Institute’s (TGen) Helios summer internship program. It was her first research experience and sparked her interest in cutting edge cancer research. After graduating from college, Bagchi took a couple of years off to gain more research experience.

She entered the U of A College of Medicine – Phoenix’s MD/PhD program in 2019. Given her research on pediatric cancer in her gap years, she expects to focus on internal medicine and pediatrics. She currently works on her cardiovascular research with her PhD advisor, Christopher Glembotski, PhD — the vice dean for Research, professor of Internal Medicine and director of the Translational Cardiovascular Research Center.

Bagchi anticipates that she will finish her PhD at the end of the year. She then plans to complete her final years of medical school and graduate with the Class of 2028.

Bagchi was inspired to pursue this research in pathological cardiac hypertrophy from seeing how a fundamental understanding of biology could be applied to uncover new ways of combating heart disease.

Now that Bagchi has shifted her research to chemotherapy-related heart failure, she feels confident about the potential impact her research will have.

“There’s a lot of work that I’ve done over the past couple of years that has shown that the way we have been modeling things has not been matching what happens in the clinics,” Bagchi said. “I hope I can lay the groundwork for looking at this issue. If I can report my findings and finish medical school, I will be happy with that.”

For Bagchi, motivation lies in bringing new research and therapies from a technical standpoint to an accessible language that patients can understand.

“There’s not a lot of scientific literacy in the general population, and that makes things even more pressing,” Bagchi said. “I need to make sure that patients understand what they are going through as best as they can.”