Hibernating Squirrels Hold Clues to Diabetes and Muscle Loss in New NIH-Funded Study

PHILADELPHIA — The Monell Chemical Senses Center announced that Neeraj Lal, PhD, an Assistant Member at the institute, has received one of the most competitive honors available to a young scientist in the United States: the National Institutes of Health Director’s New Innovator Award. The distinction, announced on October 6, 2026, recognizes exceptionally creative early-career investigators who are pursuing bold research with the potential to make a major impact on biomedical and behavioral science. For Lal, the award will fuel a research program built on one of the most improbable models in physiology: the Arctic ground squirrel, an animal that survives conditions that would quickly prove fatal to nearly any other mammal on Earth.

The award carries substantial weight in both funding and prestige. It provides $3.8 million over five years under grant number DP2DK152025-01, resources that will support the continued development of Lal’s laboratory and its ambitious agenda. Established in 2007, the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award is part of the agency’s High-Risk, High-Reward Research program, and it is deliberately structured differently from conventional grants. Unlike most traditional funding opportunities, it does not require preliminary data or a detailed experimental plan. That design gives investigators an unusual degree of freedom to pursue unconventional ideas, the kind of projects that might struggle to survive the standard peer-review gauntlet but that could, if successful, open entirely new fields of inquiry.

What makes the Arctic ground squirrel such a compelling subject is a suite of physiological feats that appear to defy the rules of mammalian biology. To prepare for hibernation, the animals gain substantial weight and become less responsive to insulin, a hormonal state that in humans would be a hallmark of progressing toward type 2 diabetes. Yet when they emerge from their torpid state, they reverse those changes without ever developing the disease. The squirrels also withstand the slowest body and brain temperatures ever recorded for any mammal, dropping into a chilled state that would cause devastating damage in most species. Understanding how they accomplish these reversals, Lal argues, could reveal evolutionary solutions to some of medicine’s most stubborn problems.

The implications extend across several major categories of chronic illness. Lal’s research program is aimed at uncovering novel therapeutic strategies for diabetes, muscle wasting disorders, and ischemic injuries, conditions that collectively affect millions of patients worldwide. Ischemic injury, in which tissue is damaged by restricted blood flow and the oxygen deprivation that follows, shares mechanistic ground with the metabolic stresses hibernating animals endure. Muscle wasting, or atrophy, is a central feature of aging, prolonged immobility, cancer, and critical illness, and it remains poorly served by existing treatments. If hibernators have evolved molecular safeguards that protect their muscles and metabolic organs through months of dormancy, decoding those safeguards could point drug developers toward targets that no one has thought to pursue.

A distinctive feature of Lal’s approach is methodological. His team is developing what are known as NAMs, or New Approach Methodologies, alongside genetic tools to investigate how the squirrels’ protective abilities operate at every scale, from individual cells to the whole animal. New Approach Methodologies is an umbrella term for innovative testing strategies, often built on cell cultures, organoids, computational models, and other alternatives to traditional approaches, that are increasingly valued in biomedical research for their ability to capture complex biology in controlled, tractable systems. Pairing these tools with genetic techniques allows the lab to probe mechanisms directly rather than merely observing correlations, an essential step if findings in squirrels are ever to be translated into therapies for people.

Equally distinctive is the conceptual framing. Rather than studying only what goes wrong in disease, as much of biomedical research necessarily does, Lal’s group is asking fundamental questions about what goes right in an animal that has already solved the problem. This inversion of the standard disease model reflects a growing appreciation in physiology that nature has run countless evolutionary experiments, and that some species hold working answers to questions medicine is still formulating. Hibernation biology has attracted renewed attention in recent years precisely because the animals that hibernate appear to sidestep conditions, from insulin resistance to muscle disuse atrophy to reperfusion injury, that plague human patients.

The Arctic ground squirrel is a particularly striking example of this phenomenon. Its hibernation cycle involves dramatic swings in body mass, metabolism, and hormonal signaling, all orchestrated and then reversed with apparent ease. In humans, sustained insulin resistance typically progresses toward diabetes, and the metabolic consequences of obesity are among the most intensively studied problems in modern medicine. The squirrel’s ability to pack on weight, suppress insulin sensitivity, and then recover full metabolic health without intervention suggests the existence of endogenous protective mechanisms. Identifying the molecular switches behind that recovery is precisely the kind of fundamental question the New Innovator Award is designed to enable.

The award also marks a significant milestone for the Monell Chemical Senses Center itself. Founded in 1968, Monell is an independent nonprofit research institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, dedicated to advancing and sharing discoveries in the science of the chemical senses: smell, taste, chemesthesis, and interoception. The institute’s mission explicitly ties basic sensory science to solving the world’s health, societal, and environmental challenges. Lal’s program fits within that tradition of pursuing fundamental biology with an eye toward broad human relevance, even though his model organism might seem, at first glance, far removed from the center’s sensory roots. Interoception, the sense of the body’s internal state, connects directly to the metabolic and neural signals that govern hibernation, appetite, and energy balance.

For early-career scientists, the New Innovator Award represents more than money. It is a signal from the NIH that an investigator’s ideas are considered genuinely original and potentially field-changing, and it often serves as a foundation on which subsequent research careers are built. The program’s explicit tolerance for uncertainty, its willingness to fund projects without preliminary data, reflects a philosophy that the most transformative science often begins as a question that cannot yet be answered with conventional pilot experiments. Lal’s bet on a hibernating rodent as a guide to human chronic disease is exactly the kind of proposition the award exists to test.

The work ahead is substantial. Translating observations from Arctic ground squirrels into treatments for diabetes, muscle wasting, or ischemic injury will require identifying the relevant molecular pathways, validating them in appropriate models, and eventually determining whether they can be safely modulated in humans. The five-year timeline and $3.8 million budget give the Lal laboratory the runway to build the NAMs and genetic toolkits needed to begin that work in earnest, moving from whole-animal observations down to cellular mechanisms and back up again. Whether the squirrels’ secrets can be bottled into therapies remains an open question, but it is precisely the sort of high-stakes, high-curiosity question that the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award was created to champion, and one whose answer could reshape how medicine thinks about chronic disease.

Subject of Research: Hibernation physiology of Arctic ground squirrels as a model for novel treatments of chronic metabolic and neurological diseases

Article Title: Monell investigator receives prestigious NIH director's new Innovator Award

Article References: Monell investigator receives prestigious NIH director's new Innovator Award. (n.d.). Original publication

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Keywords: NIH Director's New Innovator Award, Monell Chemical Senses Center, Arctic ground squirrel, hibernation, insulin resistance, diabetes, muscle wasting, ischemic injury, New Approach Methodologies, early-career investigator, metabolism, chronic disease