AHA honors Ruhul Abid’s research

A paper by Ruhul Abid, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and an associate of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center’s Center for Vascular Biology Research, published last spring in the American Heart Association (AHA) journal Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology, was recently selected from more than 650 entries as the journal’s most outstanding vascular biology paper of 2010.

Abid’s paper upends the long-held notion that reactive oxygen species (ROS) are harmful, demonstrating that ROS has another, beneficial role in the activation of an enzyme called eNOS and the nitric oxide production process — and, in fact, is necessary to maintain coronary vasodilation. Abid will receive the AHA’s 2011 Werner Risau New Investigator Award in Vascular Biology on April 29 in Chicago for this groundbreaking work.