Neel Shah Receives NSF CAREER Award to Advance Cancer-Enabling Enzyme Research

Neel H. Shah, PhD, Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Columbia University and member of the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center (HICCC) Precision Oncology and Systems Biology (POSB) program, has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award. One of the NSF’s most prestigious honors for early-career scientists, the five-year, $801,590 grant will support Shah’s research into protein tyrosine kinases—enzymes that control how cells grow, divide, and respond to their environment, and that, when dysregulated, are a major driver of cancer. 

There are 90 tyrosine kinases in the human body, and about half are known to play a role in cancer development or progression. Despite their central role, scientists still lack a complete understanding of how these enzymes choose which protein to modify inside a busy cell. Shah’s lab aims to uncover the molecular rules that guide this recognition process and to study how chemical modifications to tyrosine kinases alter their signaling activity. 

“Inhibiting these enzymes has been a long-standing challenge in cancer research,” said Shah. “By uncovering the chemical rules that guide their behavior, we can move away from trial-and-error approaches that toss thousands of compounds at the problem and instead, harness computational power to design more precise and effective drugs. This award will help us lay the groundwork for a new wave of precision cancer therapies—treatments that shut down disease-causing kinases without affecting healthy ones.” 

Shah’s project has three major aims: to determine how chemical modifications, like acetylation, that are made by the cell alter kinase activity in cancer; to use biochemical and structural approaches to refine current models of how kinases recognize their targets; and to translate this knowledge into strategies for developing highly selective kinase inhibitors. The team will also build high-throughput experimental platforms to analyze many kinases at once, producing enriched datasets that could eventually feed into machine learning models to predict better drug candidates and speed up the process of developing new treatments. 

As part of the award’s educational component, the Shah Lab will bring hands-on biochemistry lessons to a Bronx middle school, giving students the chance to explore experiments like DNA separation and plant biomolecule extraction. The lab’s approach builds on prior mentorship experiences: one of Shah’s students participated in the Scientist-in-Residence program, collaborating with Bronx teachers to develop classroom experiments. The lab now hopes to expand this model, creating ongoing opportunities for students to engage with modern experimental science.