Stavroula Kousteni, PhD

Professor of Physiology and Cellular Biophysics at Columbia 

“The TRx program gave us access to expertise and the opportunity to establish connections with a group of faculty that could readily provide advice and access to resources to successfully design and perform essential parts of the project,” Kousteni says.

The support also made it possible to assess an additional biological endpoint that had not originally been planned due to limitations in funding and available expertise at the time of submission. These additional experiments yielded results with significant translational value and therapeutic potential, strengthening the notion that LCN2 may be a therapeutically relevant molecule in the treatment of obesity. She added that the team plans to explore the translational potential of the work by presenting the research to interested investors and companies.