Mark Brimble, PhD, an assistant professor of pediatrics at WashU Medicine, has been honored with a 2026 Career Development Award from the National Bleeding Disorders Foundation. The three-year, $210,000 award helps establish early-career investigators who are pursuing innovative research on inherited blood disorders.
The grant funding will support Brimble’s development as an independent faculty member while advancing his research to make gene therapy safer and more effective for children with a genetic bleeding disorder called hemophilia, in which the blood’s ability to clot is impaired. Gene therapy uses harmless, modified viruses to deliver the gene the body needs to produce and release its own functioning blood-clotting factor proteins into the bloodstream. But a patient’s immune system sometimes mistakes the treatment for a threat and attacks it, causing the therapy to fail.
With the funding, Brimble will use sequencing tools to analyze how the body’s immune system reacts to the virus-based gene therapy. By pinpointing specific immune triggers, his goal is to redesign gene therapies, so they are undetected by the body’s defenses, ultimately making treatments safer, longer lasting and more reliable for patients.