Inside the Awad Lab: Akash Bindal

The University of Chicago is home to hundreds of the world’s most advanced laboratories and research facilities. The Inside the Lab series gives audiences a first-hand look at the University’s research laboratories and the scholars who are tackling some of the world’s most complex problems.

This includes the Awad Lab in the Department of Neurological Surgery, which researches the science behind why brain bleeds and strokes happen and studies ways to prevent them from happening.

Akash Bindal, BS’24, worked in Dr. Awad’s lab all four years of his undergraduate career (and continues to do so today). After graduating from the College with a major in molecular engineering and a minor in molecular, cellular and tissue engineering, he now works on protein engineering for cytokine therapeutics at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering while continuing to work on projects under Dr. Awad. Learn more about the work being done in the lab here.

How did you get connected to the lab?

Embarking on an engineering degree, I was broadly interested in developing innovative tools for the improvement of human life. During my first year in the College during COVID, I happened to run into Dr. Issam Awad over Zoom and spoke with him about the emerging biomarker being developed in his lab for detecting cerebral hemorrhages.

Through the Innovation Corps, a National Science Foundation-funded program, I was selected to facilitate translation of one of these biomarkers to the clinic. My stint eventually transitioned to a more scientific role in Dr. Awad’s lab, in which I worked with the basic science and clinical teams to study neurovascular disease and the aging brain while focusing on biomarker development.

You worked in the lab all four years—how did this experience influence your time as an undergraduate?

Working in Dr. Awad's lab for over four years provided a foundational experience in translational research and taught me the value of long-term continuity in scientific inquiry.

Many of the studies in the lab were multi-year projects, with experiments regularly building on ones from the years before. As a result, I was able to contribute to longitudinal studies and be a part of several collaborations with investigators at UChicago and other peer-institutions, such as Duke, UC San Francisco and UC San Diego. It was great to get to see and be a part of the evolution of our studies over time. Because of the multidisciplinary nature of these studies, I ended up working closely with a team of bioinformaticians, geneticists, imaging experts, clinical researchers, neuropathologists and surgeons.

Through the years, I came to appreciate the amount of time, organization, and collaboration needed to execute impactful translational research. I grew into a role that involved maintaining practical responsibilities like keeping track of patient samples from several sites while being able to keep the underlying scientific questions in focus in order to appropriately integrate the vast array of bioinformatic data that we were extracting from these samples. This exposure ultimately laid the groundwork for the kind of work I hope to do in the future.

It also afforded me numerous opportunities to present my research before diverse audiences, including international experts in neurovascular disease and stroke care, patients, and peers. Along the way, I also learned how to write compelling research proposals and support myself on independent projects in the lab through sources like the Quad Grants and the Provost Scholarship.

Why did the work of the lab interest you?

Neurosurgery is a rapidly evolving field, in which the natural histories of several pathologies have yet to be elucidated, presenting exciting opportunities for clinically impactful research. For instance, what leads to brain bleeding, which can be drastically life-changing or even fatal, is not always clear and hard to predict. Current methods for assessing risk are error prone and rely heavily on expensive and at-times hard to access imaging.

I was drawn to Dr. Awad’s research as it sought to explain why brain bleeding can happen, catch these events early, and even predict them. Developing an easy blood test that could provide crucial information around the risk of bleeding to inform clinical management and clarify the need for potential surgical interventions deeply resonated with me when I first joined.

As a lab, we primarily focused on Cerebral Cavernous Malformations (CCMs), a rare disease that served as our model for a neurovascular disease that predisposes patients to a high risk of brain bleeding. I got to learn and work with the framework Dr. Awad had been using to extensively characterize CCM, not only on imaging and histology, but also at the level of cellular, genetic and metabolic dysregulation. The framework integrated genetics, metabolomics and imaging to create a cohesive understanding about the disease in a way that facilitated biomarker development. This became especially exciting as I started applying this scientific framework more broadly to cerebral microbleeds, a disease of the aging brain, as well.

What is one project you’ve worked on that you’re particularly proud of?

Aside from assisting with the bleeding biomarker in CCM and disease characterization studies for CMBs, one of my independent projects involved looking at if circulating microRNAs, which are known regulators of gene expression, could reflect treatment response in a pre-clinical CCM model.

In a collaboration between UChicago and Duke, mice with CCM were treated with an FDA-approved drug, as it happened to target a key pathway known to also be a driver of lesion growth in CCM. I was able to show that certain miRNAs, which targeted genes that were part of the pathway of interest, were dysregulated and reflected drug administration.

Although the drug did not ameliorate the lesions in the brains and the exact mechanism of miRNA interaction remains to be explored, I was able to show that certain miRNAs could potentially serve as a blood-based markers for treatment response in CCM. In the future, identified and validated miRNAs could serve as monitoring biomarkers for CCM treatment in clinical trials.