August 25, 2017 – Fargo, North Dakota – Dr. Yagna Jarajapu, associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at North Dakota State University, has received a two-year $154,000 grant award from American Heart Association. He conducts research to help people with diabetes that experience blood vessel damage due to their disease.

People with diabetes face unique challenges when it comes to wound healing.

“Due to long-term diabetes in older adults, the blood vessels are damaged so they cannot repair injury,” said Jarajapu. “If you go for a surgery and a person has diabetes, they want to check whether you can heal well following the surgery. Diabetes is known to impair the healing capacity because blood vessels don’t regenerate immediately following surgery.

“It has been a problem for a long time and still we don’t have any reliable treatments. We are trying to find new, novel approaches to enhance vascular regeneration by enhancing the function of stem cells that we already have in the body,” said Jarajapu.

His research is titled “Mas Receptor: A Target for Bone Marrow Mobilopathy and Vascular Repair in Diabetes.” 

Dr. Jarajapu and his research group’s work also was recognized among the top 10 percent of research accepted for presentation at American Heart Association conferences in 2017 and is accredited as best of AHA specialty conferences.

He received his Ph.D from Glasgow Caledonian University and his master of science degree from University of Strathclyde, both in the United Kingdom. Dr. Jarajapu received his pharmacy degrees from Andhra University in India. He joined the faculty in pharmaceutical sciences at North Dakota State University in 2011.

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