Scripps Research scientist Ilia Droujinine receives over $3 million to reveal the body’s interorgan networks

The awards from the NIDDK and the LLHF will let Droujinine uncover how interorgan communication goes awry in metabolic disease and aging, paving the way for new treatments.

September 25, 2024

LA JOLLA, CA— Ilia Droujinine, PhD, assistant professor at the Department of Molecular Medicine at Scripps Research, has received $3.2 million in funding over five years from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) to study metabolic disorders and potentially uncover novel therapeutics.

Droujinine focuses on interorgan communication, by which the organs in our body work together to coordinate everyday functions like aging, nutrient uptake, cell division and more to maintain a healthy, stable state, called homeostasis. But when faulty connections arise, disorders such as obesity or diabetes can develop and lead to severe complications.

NIDDK, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), supports research into various diseases considered among the most chronic, costly, and consequential for patients. The NIDDK grant provides Droujinine with support to research interorgan communication in homeostasis and obesity—the latter a strong factor in many of the disorders that NIDDK supports research into, such as gastrointestinal and fatty liver diseases.

“Obesity and diabetes affect millions of people in the U.S. and expanding our understanding of how our body’s organs communicate to respond to these health factors is critical if we are to meaningfully address these major health crises. Our lab will use our newly developed proteomic technologies to determine the secreted proteins that mediate this communication, the stimuli that they respond to, and the biological processes that they affect in distal tissues,” Droujinine says.

Droujinine also received an award from the Larry L. Hillblom Foundation (LLHF), a nonprofit funded through a bequest from Larry L. Hillblom, businessman and co-founder of DHL Worldwide Express. The LLHF grants awards supporting medical research throughout California, with a particular focus on chronic and degenerative diseases associated with aging. The LLHF Start-up award will provide Droujinine’s lab with $360,000 in funding during its three-year term, starting July 2025, for research into the regulation of gut interorgan communication proteins.

“These two awards will provide vital support in the research of interorgan communications to further identify avenues of combating these metabolic diseases and similar age-related conditions. I am truly grateful to the NIDDK and LLHF for supporting high-risk, but high-reward science conducted by a junior faculty lab. This makes a world of difference to the development of our lab, and hopefully, in the future, to advancing our understanding of metabolic disease mechanisms,” says Droujinine.

Droujinine has been a pioneer in understanding the body’s interorgan communication networks. His lab focuses on researching these networks, how they help the body achieve homeostasis, how metabolic diseases can change these networks, and how altered networks can lead to disease development. He and his lab have already developed a critical platform that uncovers how secreted proteins—which are produced by one organ and then travel through the blood to another organ—communicate during various biological and physiological processes, as well as how aging impacts these processes. This research has the potential to inform future strategies of treating metabolic disease.

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