NIH Backs Bold Epigenetics Quest to Decode How Immune Cells Walk the Tightrope Between Defense and Disease

In a field where the boldest ideas often struggle to find early funding, the National Institutes of Health has once again placed its confidence in unconventional thinking. Van Andel Institute in Grand Rapids, Michigan, announced on October 6, 2026, that Derek Janssens, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the institute’s Department of Epigenetics, has been selected to receive a 2026 New Innovator Award from the NIH Common Fund’s High-Risk, High-Reward Program. He is one of only 42 scientists nationwide to earn the distinction this year, a cohort deliberately chosen for projects that challenge conventional wisdom and could, if successful, reshape how entire areas of biomedical science are understood. The honor arrives with a five-year, nearly $4.6 million grant, a level of sustained support that is rare for early-career investigators and that signals the agency’s conviction that Janssens’ line of inquiry deserves room to run.

The award will fuel an ambitious effort to build and apply new tools for studying epigenetics, the collection of mechanisms that determine how genes are switched on or off without altering the underlying DNA sequence. If the genome is the instruction manual of the cell, epigenetics is the system of bookmarks, highlights, and sticky notes that decides which pages get read and when. These regulatory marks are essential for normal development and health, allowing a single genome to produce a neuron, a muscle cell, or an immune cell with identical DNA but profoundly different behaviors. When the system misfires, however, the consequences can be severe, and disrupted epigenetic regulation is now recognized as a driving force in cancer and a growing list of other diseases.

Janssens’ project homes in on one of the most consequential frontiers of that field: the epigenetic control of immunity-related genes. The immune system faces a fundamental balancing act. It must mount a response vigorous enough to eliminate infected cells or emerging tumors, yet restrained enough to avoid turning its firepower on the body’s own healthy tissue. Too little activity leaves a person vulnerable to infection and malignancy; too much invites autoimmune destruction. How cells calibrate that window has long been understood to involve gene regulation, but directly observing the regulatory machinery at work inside human immune cells has remained a formidable technical challenge.

“The immune system operates within a remarkably narrow window — it needs to respond strongly enough to eliminate cancer or infection without becoming so active that it attacks healthy tissue,” Janssens said in the announcement. “What is exciting about this project is that we now have clinical data that suggests epigenetic changes may shift that balance. This award will enable us to build the tools to see these important regulatory mechanisms directly in human immune cells and understand what separates a productive immune response from a harmful one.” The statement captures the dual promise of the work: a basic-science advance in how gene regulation is studied, and a translational one in how immune-related diseases might eventually be monitored and treated.

Central to the effort is a platform developed in Janssens’ own laboratory called CoCUT&Tag, a method that allows scientists to examine how two proteins interact on DNA. That capability matters because many epigenetic regulations are not the work of a single molecular player but of partnerships — a transcription factor recruiting an enzyme, a histone mark cooperating with a chromatin remodeler, or two proteins binding in concert to open or close a stretch of genome. Traditional profiling techniques typically map one protein at a time, leaving the crucial question of cooperation invisible. By capturing pairwise interactions on DNA, CoCUT&Tag offers a first-of-its-kind window into these molecular conversations, and the New Innovator Award will allow Janssens to extend and refine the platform further.

The tools will not be developed in a vacuum. A key component of the project involves analyzing blood samples from patients with two very different immune-related conditions: myelodysplastic syndrome, or MDS, an early-stage blood cancer in which the bone marrow fails to produce healthy blood cells, and lupus, an autoimmune disorder in which the immune system mistakenly attacks the body’s own tissues. Studying both conditions side by side is scientifically elegant, because they represent opposite failures of the same balance — one in which immune function falters, and one in which it overreaches. Epigenetic signatures that differ between healthy and diseased immune cells could reveal what tips the system in either direction.

Access to the MDS samples will come through the Van Andel Institute–Stand Up To Cancer Epigenetics Dream Team, a multi-institutional collaboration that supports clinical trials of potential epigenetic cancer medications. Such clinical partnerships are increasingly recognized as essential to epigenetics research, because patterns observed in cell lines and animal models do not always translate to human biology. Human samples carry the accumulated regulatory history of real disease — the marks laid down by years of malfunctioning signaling, environmental exposure, and treatment pressure — and give scientists insights into how epigenetic changes actually drive disease-related changes in the body.

For Janssens personally, the award marks the latest milestone in a rapid ascent through the epigenetics field. He joined Van Andel Institute in 2024 after completing a postdoctoral fellowship at Fred Hutch Cancer Center, one of the leading centers for cancer and immunology research in the United States. Before that transition, he received a K22 grant from the National Cancer Institute, a mechanism designed specifically to help scientists bridge the gap between postdoctoral training and running an independent laboratory. The trajectory — from transition grant to one of the nation’s most competitive early-career honors within roughly two years of establishing his lab — reflects both the momentum of his science and the institute’s investment in recruiting emerging talent to its epigenetics portfolio.

The New Innovator Award itself has a distinctive philosophy. Established in 2007 as part of the NIH Common Fund’s High-Risk, High-Reward Program, it is reserved for scientists within ten years of completing their final degree or clinical residency and is intended to fund unusually innovative research that might be considered too speculative for traditional grant mechanisms. The program’s premise is that transformative discoveries often come from researchers willing to pursue questions others avoid, and that the early-career stage — before conventional funding tracks narrow a scientist’s ambitions — is precisely when such risk-taking should be encouraged. Janssens’ selection among this year’s 42 recipients places him in a lineage of investigators whose projects have spanned everything from novel gene-editing approaches to entirely new models of disease.

The broader stakes of the work extend well beyond MDS and lupus. Epigenetic therapies — drugs that reprogram gene regulation rather than targeting DNA directly — have already earned regulatory approval in certain cancers, and the immune system has become one of the most dynamic arenas in medicine, from checkpoint inhibitors that unleash T cells against tumors to immunotherapies that must be carefully dosed to avoid toxic side effects. If epigenetic changes can indeed shift the balance between a productive immune response and a harmful one, as clinical data now suggests, then the ability to observe those changes directly in human immune cells could inform how such therapies are designed, combined, and monitored. In that sense, a five-year investment of $4.6 million in one young scientist’s toolkit may ultimately pay dividends across oncology, autoimmunity, and immunology alike — a bet on curiosity that the NIH’s High-Risk, High-Reward Program was built to make.

Subject of Research: Epigenetic regulation of immune system genes studied with novel protein-interaction mapping tools

Article Title: Van Andel Institute’s Dr. Derek Janssens receives a New Innovator Award from the National Institutes of Health Common Fund

Article References: Van Andel Institute’s Dr. Derek Janssens receives a New Innovator Award from the National Institutes of Health Common Fund. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: epigenetics, NIH, New Innovator Award, High-Risk High-Reward Program, Van Andel Institute, immune system, CoCUT&Tag, myelodysplastic syndrome, lupus, gene regulation, cancer research, autoimmunity