Before highlighting the content of the inaugural Forum, which included an introduction by Boyd Professor Nicolas Bazan, MD, PhD, and which featured Chancellor Jim Dalton, PhD, as its guest speaker and discussant, it will be worthwhile to explain the broader goals of CREST Centers in general, the Innovation Front Porch Forum in particular, and protein nanomotors at the heart of its research.  

What Is CREST and What Are Protein Nanomotors?

A CREST Center is not simply a research grant. Rather, NSF views a CREST Center as a vehicle for building institution-wide research and training capacity, thus creating a sustainable, nationally competitive research enterprise – with education, faculty development, student development, and broader community impact integrated into that effort. Dr. Kim was awarded her CREST award to establish a research center dedicated to understanding protein nanomotors – nature's microscopic machines.

The CREST-AND Center will investigate how these remarkable molecular machines are biologically engineered to generate and modify mechanical forces and how they interact with the cell's internal framework, other molecular motors, and naturally occurring molecules. Although protein nanomotors are far too small to see with standard microscopes, specialized imaging and other advanced technology show that they perform essential tasks inside living cells – helping to move materials, organize cellular structures, and enable cells to function and respond to their environment. At its core, the Center is seeking to understand how nature builds, controls, and adapts these tiny biological machines. Hence the term “adaptive nanomotor development.”

This work is fundamental science, but it also has the potential to create new opportunities in medicine, biotechnology, and engineering. A better understanding of molecular motors could help scientists identify mechanisms involved in disease and, ultimately, specify potential new therapeutic targets. Knowledge of how cells naturally move and deliver molecular cargo can also inspire new approaches to targeted drug delivery and other biomedical technologies. More broadly, nature's ability to create efficient machines at the molecular scale may provide insights into principles than can foster the development of new technologies. Overall, the CREST-AND Center will leverage this scientific effort to strengthen LSU's research enterprise more broadly, develop the next generation of scientists, and work with industry to promulgate opportunities for commercialization.

The August 19th Innovation Front Porch Forum

Another important goal of the Center is to connect LSU's scientific expertise with schools, educators, community organizations, industry, and other partners. Outreach and engagement will help broaden participation in STEM and share the excitement and potential of modern biological science with the wider community. To achieve this goal, Dr. Kim planned the “Innovation Front Porch Forums,” the first of which occurred on August 19th.

The Forum itself proceeded in three parts:

• Dr. Kim first described her journey from initial work on molecular nanomotors to the CREST Center. She traced a 20-year process beginning with post-Katrina rebuilding of laboratories and scientific relationships, proceeding to successful peer mentoring of two generations of investigators, and finally culminating in CREST-AND. Key points in Dr. Kim’s presentation included building research capacity, connecting disciplines and institutions, and translating discoveries into meaningful real-world impact.

• Next, Dr. Dalton told his fascinating story – both scientific and personal – of the long and winding road between drug discovery and commercialization. Dr. Dalton’s story focused on a novel non-steroidal molecule developed in his laboratory that is a first-in-class “selective androgen receptor modulator” (SARM). The molecule was designed to preserve or build lean muscle mass (e.g., in cancer patients with cachexia), without producing undesirable effects in other androgen-sensitive tissues. While the selective effect on muscle was shown in phase 3 trials – a process that entailed a years-long, many-step ordeal with variable regulatory requirements, and a leave from academia to start a company and raise funds to support it – the results did not reach the required regulatory improvement in physical function, as measured by stair-climbing performance. Reaching that point required years of research, evolving regulatory requirements, Dr. Dalton’s temporary departure from academia to guide preclinical and clinical studies, and substantial fundraising to support clinical development.  But yet the story continues! This molecule may be useful in combination with GLP-1 drugs to preserve muscle mass while body weight declines.
  

• Finally, Dr. Dalton engaged in conversation with Dr. Kim and the audience.  A robust discussion centered on science, entrepreneurship, translation, and the challenges involved in moving discoveries from the lab toward practical application.
  

The Forum was very well received, with approximately 110 attendees and representatives from 10 community organizations in the audience. Even more encouraging, the event generated meaningful follow-up opportunities in research partnerships, entrepreneurship, and trainee development. The Forum demonstrated that bringing industry leaders to campus will create natural, low-barrier opportunities for our faculty and trainees to explore potential research partnerships through direct, in-person conversations. Recurring forum engagements will no doubt also help us learn from different models of academic-industry collaboration and technology transfer, while identifying ways in which LSU Health's scientific strengths might align with areas of strategic importance to industry.

Equally encouraging momentum was seen among our trainees. Medical students interested in entrepreneurship can now begin to develop their ideas toward participation in national pitch competitions. At the Forum, they had the opportunity to meet directly with Louisiana Economic Development leadership, which immediately broadened their understanding of the state's innovation ecosystem and the resources available to them. CREST-AND will also provide financial support for their participation in the LSU Baton Rouge I-Corps program, helping them strengthen their entrepreneurial skills.

Dr. Sunyoung Kim

Dr. Kim’s path to science began with a childhood fascination: how could living systems build such extraordinary complexity from a limited set of parts? That question led her to the University of Michigan for doctoral training, including research at the University of Padua in Italy, and then to postdoctoral work at the University of Minnesota. At Michigan, she met Dr. Edward Wojcik, who became her husband, an intellectual partner, and, later, a collaborator in molecular motor research. 

Their complementary perspectives – hers in biochemistry and biophysics, his in genetics and cell biology – would prove especially powerful. In 2005, Dr. Kim joined LSU Health New Orleans, attracted by the opportunity to build an independent research program in a collaborative institution serving a distinctive community. Hurricane Katrina soon tested that decision and taught her that institutions can disappear more quickly than the questions that give scientific lives meaning. 

A period at Harvard Medical School then immersed Drs. Kim and Wojcik in kinesin science and redirected her longstanding interest in biological energy conversion toward molecular nanomotors – tiny machines that organize, transport, and divide living cells.  They then rebuilt their home and laboratories at LSU Health, because the LSU Health community demonstrated extraordinary resilience, creativity, partnership, and commitment to community. CREST-AND is the culmination of that journey: a center connecting structural biology, genetics, imaging, artificial intelligence, and workforce development to understand adaptive nanomotors while building enduring scientific capacity. Beyond the laboratory, she values family life, mentoring young scientists, entrepreneurship, and the culture and community of New Orleans – interests that keep science connected to people and place.

Summary

NSF explicitly states that it expects CREST awardees to "catalyze institutional transformation" by developing research capabilities aligned with the institution's long-term missions. It also expects Centers to leverage CREST funding into additional federal, state, local, private-sector, and philanthropic investment. Thus, the goal of CREST-AND at LSU Health New Orleans is not simply to fund five years of research; it is to use research as a catalyst to strengthen the institution's long-term capacity for discovery, education, innovation, and community impact.

Specifically, our NSF CREST Center will strengthen our capacity to conduct nationally competitive research. It will bring together faculty, students, and external partners to advance important scientific questions while building research infrastructure and developing faculty research careers. It will provide students with hands-on opportunities to participate in discovery and entrepreneurship. The Center will also broaden participation in STEM, develop educational and community partnerships, and leverage the research and collaborations generated through the award to attract additional external funding and create a sustainable research enterprise.

In this light, we are extremely grateful to Dr. Kim and the others who contributed to the CREST-AND grant for bringing this potentially transformative NSF-funded opportunity to LSU Health New Orleans.

According to the American Association for Cancer Research, 50-60 percent of patients with cancer in the U.S. receive radiation at some point during their treatment. Recognizing the critical role radiation therapy plays in cancer care, our clinical partner, LCMC Health, employs six radiation oncologists who provide excellent patient care. Guided by our mission to weave together clinical practice with research and education, LSU Health New Orleans identified a clear opportunity to strengthen our academic, clinical, and research enterprise: an academic department of radiation oncology.

To bridge this gap, and to advance our goal of NCI designation, we have created the Department of Radiation Oncology in the School of Medicine, which has been approved by the LSU Board of Supervisors and the Louisiana Board of Regents. In this newsletter, I will outline a brief history of the field, including why radiation oncology now plays such an integral role in cancer treatments. And with great pleasure, I will introduce Puneeth Iyengar, MD, PhD, who has joined LSU Health New Orleans as the inaugural chair of the department.

History

The field of radiation oncology has a remarkable history: it began soon after the discovery of X-rays in the late 1800s and has evolved from relatively crude treatments of superficial tumors into a highly precise, image-guided discipline capable of treating tumors with accuracy and precision.

It all began in November 1895 when Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, head of the physics department at the University of Würzburg, watched a mysterious image appear on a screen in his laboratory—an image produced by rays no one had ever seen or understood. Within a short period of time, those invisible rays were being used to treat human disease.

Shortly after Röntgen’s discovery, physicians came to realize that X-rays did more than produce images: prolonged exposure could damage skin and other tissues. In 1898, Marie and Pierre Curie discovered radium. Radium's intense radioactivity made it possible to put a radioactive source directly into or next to a tumor—the beginning of what has come to be known as “brachytherapy.” Publication soon followed documenting cases of skin cancers successfully treated with X-rays. Radiation oncology was born.

What followed is one of the most extraordinary stories of modern medicine. Over the next 130 years, physics, biology, engineering, imaging, computing, and clinical medicine transformed an obscure physical phenomenon into a remarkably precise instrument of healing. Today, radiation can be directed at a tumor with millimeter accuracy, adapted to the anatomy of individual patients and their tumors, combined with surgery and systemic therapy, and delivered in ways unimaginable to Röntgen. Radiation oncology is a remarkable testament to what happens when scientific discovery and human ingenuity converge in the service of healing.

From the beginning, and continuing to this day, the field of radiation oncology has wrestled with a fundamental problem: radiation can kill cancer cells, but it also can kill surrounding normal cells. Thus, the central challenge of radiation oncology became finding a way to give enough radiation at the right location to destroy the tumor without causing unacceptable injury to normal tissues.

In the early 1900s, it was discovered that different cells have different sensitivities to radiation – and that the rate and timing of radiation delivery matter. This ultimately led to the revolutionary concept of fractionation—i.e., dividing the total radiation dose into many smaller doses rather than delivering it all at once. From this perspective, in 1922 Henri Coutard and colleagues demonstrated that sequential courses of fractionated radiation could cure laryngeal cancers while allowing normal tissues to recover between treatments. This was arguably one of the most important conceptual breakthroughs in the history of radiation oncology: the principle that tumor cells accumulate radiation injury, while normal tissue has greater capacity to repair sublethal injuries between fractional treatments. This biological difference is the basis for the concept of “therapeutic ratio,” the optimization and refinement of which has guided subsequent advances in the field to this day.

These advances have included:

• 1930s–1940s: Early X-ray machines were relatively low-energy and could treat primarily superficial tumors. In 1930s and 1940s, various cobalt-based machines began producing higher-energy radiation that allowed treatment of tumors deeper in the body.
• 1950s-1980s: In the 1950s, a critical technological breakthrough was developed at Hammersmith Hospital in London and refined at Stanford: The linear accelerator (“linac”) could produce X-rays and electron beams of varying energies, permitting increased conformality and normal tissue sparing with more optimally shaped fields of treatment directed at the tumor. This also allowed for subsequent refinements, including computer-controlled intensity modulation. In the 1970s and 1980s, linacs progressively replaced cobalt machines.
• 1970s-2000s: The introduction of CT and MRI scanning was another key milestone. Previously, radiation oncologists essentially treated a three-dimensional tumor using two-dimensional X-ray images. CT and MRI scans produced images of the tumor with well-defined, three-dimensional volumes. This allowed radiation treatment plans that greatly reduced the amount of healthy tissue that was in the path of radiation. Instead of treating a rectangular 2-D field, radiation oncologists could now shape radiation around the 3-D geometry of the tumor. Image guidance and modulation of intensity to a patient-specific dose distribution that conformed to his or her particular anatomy further improved the therapeutic ratio.
• Recent years: The past several decades have seen additional advances:
  • Stereotactic radiation, a high-dose radiation directed to a precisely-defined target or "surgery without the incision." The underlying concept is that extraordinary geometric precision permits a very high biological dose to the tumor while limiting exposure of surrounding tissue. Modern external-beam radiation uses sophisticated computer planning and can use photons, electrons, or protons.
  • Insertion of radioactive sources inside a tumor (the previously referenced “brachytherapy”) has advanced substantially because of the higher resolution of imaging and improved devices for delivery of the radiation.
  • While radiation alone can fully treat many cancers (e.g., selected cases of prostate, breast, lung, head and neck, and skin cancers) integration of radiation with systemic therapy, including chemotherapy, immunotherapy, and hormonal therapy, has become critical in the treatment of these and many other cancers.

The Department of Radiation Oncology

To extend our tri-fold mission of excellence in patient care, research, and education into the field of radiation oncology, it was important to identify an inaugural chair who has had a robust “triple threat” career. LSU Health New Orleans is extremely fortunate to have recruited the right person for the job: Puneeth Iyengar, MD, PhD.

Dr. Iyengar is coming home to Louisiana and to LSU. Raised in Baton Rouge and an alumnus of Baton Rouge Magnet High School, Dr. Iyengar was nurtured in the ideals of academia by his father, Sitharama Iyengar, PhD, who served as chair of the Department of Computer Science at LSU for nearly 20 years. He grew up in the Kenilworth neighborhood off of Highland Road, a stone’s throw from the then newly created LSU Pennington Biomedical Research Center and a few miles south of LSU’s campus. Often, when accompanying his father to work on weekends, he would run into the likes of LSU basketball coach Dale Brown, legends Shaquille O’Neal and Mahmoud Abdul Rauf (formerly known as Chris Jackson). But he also absorbed aspects of Louisiana culture that have never left him, like his love for gumbo, jambalaya, and étouffée and his eternal obsession with the wins (and losses) of the LSU Tigers and New Orleans Saints. When he was away from Louisiana for his extensive medical training, all his mentors would call him an honorary Cajun, attributed to his deep love for Louisiana.

Dr. Iyengar earned his Bachelor of Science degree at MIT, where he conducted research in a combined group led by Nobel Prize winner Har Gobind Khorana and Uttam Lal RajBhandary on fundamental biology of protein translation. From there, he went on to medical school at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in NYC, receiving both MD and PhD degrees, with his PhD in cancer biology. He conducted his doctoral dissertation research in the laboratory of renowned obesity researcher, Dr. Philipp Scherer, on mechanisms of how unhealthy adipose/fat tissue could promote breast cancer development. His work there led to the discovery of new molecules to target in the fight against breast cancer. From New York, Dr. Iyengar moved to Houston to complete his residency in Radiation Oncology at MD Anderson Cancer Center.

His first faculty position was at the University of Texas Southwestern (UTSW) Medical Center in Dallas. There, he rose to the positions of Vice Chair of the Department of Radiation Oncology and Co-leader of the Thoracic Oncology Program at the UTSW Harold Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center. His work established new paradigms that have had a profound impact on patient care. Specifically, his clinical trial efforts helped establish for the first time the critical role of radiation therapy in the management of patients with metastatic cancer in optimizing survival and quality of life. In addition, his basic and translational research efforts, funded by the NIH and the National Cancer Institute, have led to new potential ways to treat cancer patients with cachexia, the debilitating syndrome associated with wasting of muscle and fat and anorexia. After rising in the academic ranks at UTSW, Dr. Iyengar was recruited to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, where he served as Director of the Metastatic Program in Radiation Oncology, a position in which he directed the clinical and research efforts of 25 faculty members.

Nationally, Dr. Iyengar is a member of the NCI Thoracic Malignancy Steering Committee and Translational Vice Chair of the NCI NRG Lung Committee, two assignments that have placed Dr. Iyengar in a circle of clinicians, scientists, and patient advocates who determine how the NCI prioritizes the use of federal funds for national lung cancer trials.

As of September 1, 2026, Dr. Iyengar became the inaugural Chair of Radiation Oncology at the LSU Health New Orleans School of Medicine. He has a joint appointment as Professor of Interdisciplinary Oncology and will serve as Associate Cancer Center Director for Intercampus Programs. In addition, he will lead a new program that he is creating in the field of cancer and metabolism.

Now back in his beloved home state, Dr. Iyengar aims to establish an academic Radiation Oncology Department at LSU Health New Orleans that will “become known for clinical practice and research that have a profound impact on patients, and education that supports training of the next wave of radiation oncologists, this time coming out of the state of Louisiana.” He will also help create a statewide clinical trial network that “will focus on ensuring that all patients in Louisiana have access to the same high level of oncology care, the same access to screening, the same access to cutting edge treatment trials originating from Louisiana, and ultimately the best opportunities to lead a long and happy life with their families and friends, ensuring that cancer becomes a curable and/or chronic illness, not one that shortens lives and impairs the quality of lives.” 

Please join me in welcoming Dr. Puneeth Iyengar to the LSU Health New Orleans family!