ASBMB announces 2026 JBC/Tabor awardees

Leanne Duke

Leanne Duke

Leanne Duke is a research associate in the Viral Vector and Gene Editing Core Facility at the Florida Institute of Pediatric Rare Diseases. She received her Ph.D. in biomedical sciences from Florida State University’s College of Medicine in 2024, where she was supervised by Robert J. Tomko Jr. in the Department of Biomedical Sciences. During her Ph.D. she studied the cellular biology and therapeutic applications of small extracellular vesicles, or sEVs. She was recognized for the paper “Tetraspanin CD9 alters cellular trafficking and endocytosis of tetraspanin CD63, affecting CD63 packaging into small extracellular vesicles.”

Duke and her colleagues showed that the tetraspanin protein CD9 regulates the cellular trafficking and packaging of CD63, a protein commonly enriched in small extracellular vesicles that is pivotal for sEV cargo selection and can mediate sEV uptake and immune modulation by recipient cells.  Using super-resolution microscopy, they revealed that CD9 determines which populations of sEVs carry CD63, providing further evidence that tetraspanins control the formation and cargo sorting of certain sEV populations. This work advances understanding of cellular communication by sEVs in health and disease and informs efforts to produce “designer” sEVs for therapeutic cargo delivery to cells.

Jaison D Sa

Jaison D Sa

Jaison D Sa is a postdoctoral researcher who recently completed his Ph.D. in Wai-Hong Tham’s lab at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research and the University of Melbourne in Australia. He was recognized for the paper, “Stabilized designs of the malaria adhesin protein PvRBP2b for use as a potential diagnostic for Plasmodium vivax,” published in JBC in 2025 and selected as an Editor’s Pick. In this study, D Sa and colleagues addressed a key barrier to malaria elimination by improving the stability and production of PvRBP2b, a leading serological biomarker of recent P. vivax infection. Using computational stability design and AI-based approaches, they engineered PvRBP2b variants with substantially increased yield and thermal stability while preserving recognition by naturally acquired human antibodies. Structural and biophysical analyses confirmed retention of immunologically relevant surfaces and validation using longitudinal cohort samples from malaria-endemic regions showed that the stabilized designs maintained the sensitivity and specificity required for serological detection of recent infection, supporting their use in malaria elimination programs.

Jennifer Heritz and Katherine Meluni

Jennifer Heritz

Katherine Meluni

Jennifer Heritz is a Ph.D. candidate and Katherine Meluni is a Ph.D. student at SUNY Upstate Medical University under the mentorship of Mehdi Mollapour. They were recognized for the paper, “Integrating deep learning for posttranslational modifications crosstalk on Hsp90 and drug binding.” In this study, Heritz, Meluni and colleagues identified how coordinated posttranslational modifications, or PTMs, on the molecular chaperone Hsp90 regulate its drug interactions and functions, revealing a shared modification and signaling signature when HDAC3 or HDAC8 is deleted in human cells. By integrating mass spectrometry with a deep-learning prediction model, they demonstrate that artificial intelligence can rapidly and accurately decipher complex PTM crosstalk on proteins central to cancer-relevant proteostasis networks.

Huan Yang

Huan Yang

Huan Yang is the founder and CEO of Ruige, a Chinese biotech startup focused on gene therapy and targeted protein degradation. He was a research fellow in Stuart Orkin’s laboratory at the Dana-Farber Boston Children’s Hospital Cancer and Blood Disorders Center and Harvard Medical School. Inspired by his research experience there, he subsequently founded the company. Yang is recognized for the paper, “Redirecting E3 Ubiquitin Ligases for Targeted Protein Degradation with Heterologous Recognition Domains.” Yang and colleagues identified TRIM10 and TRIM58 as erythroid lineage-specific E3 ubiquitin ligases and achieved efficient degradation of BCL11A by replacing their PRY-SPRY domain with heterologous recognition domains, including coiled-coil peptides, nanobodies and the substrate recognition domain of cereblon. Their work establishes a broadly applicable strategy for evaluating the targeted protein degradation potential of E3 ubiquitin ligases and provides a strong rationale for discovering ligands for TRIM10 and TRIM58 to enable erythroid-selective depletion of proteins of interest.

Robert Cail and Faviolla Báez–Cruz

Robert Cail

Faviolla Báez–Cruz

Robert Cail is a postdoctoral scholar at Johnson and Johnson Innovative Medicine, where he works in preclinical discovery for cell therapies. Faviolla Báez–Cruz is an associate scientist and medical writer at the National Comprehensive Cancer Network. She previously conducted research as a graduate student and postdoctoral researcher under the mentorship of E. Michael Ostap and studied the biochemical and biophysical properties of myosins. They are recognized for the article "Dynamics of β-cardiac myosin between the super-relaxed and disordered-relaxed states," co-supervised by Yale Goldman and Michael Ostap at the University of Pennsylvania. In this article, Cail and Báez–Cruz found that, contrary to previous models, purified β-cardiac myosin establishes a rapid equilibrium between open and closed conformations that depends on myosin's tail domain, and they developed a method to measure how disease-causing mutations and drug treatments alter this equilibrium. Disruptions to this equilibrium are thought to contribute to diseases such as hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.